FromSoftware's Weirdest Game — Shadow Tower Abyss

⚔ + 🔫 = 👹

I love how the story is basically that this dude shows up goes “oh no” and murders nearly everything in his path for hours on end then just goes “Welp time to go home”

The Virgin “Blighttown” vs. the Chad “Poison Area”

Wow the pendant even says it's useless but gives the traveler "fond memories" it's totally a reference to their older games I can't believe we spent all this time theorizing what it did when it was just a cute reference to an old game no one played

From probably has several early 2000’s games that nobody has even discovered yet sitting in a warehouse somewhere next to the Ark of the Covenant.

I can't believe bloodborne was a sequel all this time

Something interesting to note about from soft and their themes is that Patches also appears (by name, and as far as I remember this is the first time he's named) in Armored Core For Answer, from softwares original flagship series. All these games have reoccurring themes and I love that. Also of note is that Armored Core For Answer was Miyazaki's directorial debut at fromsoft, and it also has the Moonlight energy blade as a weapon in game. He's been on this shit for years. Even more down the rabbit hole, For Answer's composer, Kota Hoshino, is in a band called FreQuency whose members are made up of many of the composers of bloodborne.

Holy shit I remember seeing this a long long time ago. Was living in Cincinnati and a friend I made at school had a birthday party, I was invited, and I remember him pulling this gem out and kicking it on. Why did he have this game? He grew up in Japan. Didn't understand anything because I didn't speak Japanese. He translated for us but we we're just interested in how bonkers this game was. Awesome time, and awesome to see this game brought into light on youtube.

the time travel animation sequence is therapeutic

To be fair, refusing to drop anything as I'm slowly crushed to death by my own loot is exactly how I play games with inventory weight limits.

I love how this game handles guns. It actually makes fucking sense you know? Guns are the reason we no longer go to war wearing armour, because even a bullet from a 15th century muzzle-loader could go right through plate armour and that meant a very bad time. Like oh sure this giant man who can crush a boulder with his hands is running at you... but he's still very much a man and GLOCK is very effective against man.

I would love to see something among the lines of a gun manufacturer going into a parallel fantasy universe where he's forced to use guns as sparingly as possible due to the lack of resources and has to make due with a mix of fantasy weapons and home-made Fallout-esque guns. What a novel and under-played idea

I legitimately love the premise of this game. "Descend into this fantasy dungeon, slay the dark beasts and demons as best you can. If your blade cannot find purchase in the monsters' hides, here have this glock " I also love the honesty of "Poison area" ticking the Souls trope

It's always jarring to see how many concepts they share amongst all their games. Not just the Moonlight Greatsword, but so many things.

me : I really should study also me : this obscure from software game that ive never heard of and will never play looks pretty neat

I love how FromSoft has been doing nearly the same thing for twenty years, just iterating the games very slightly with each release, getting closer and closer to perfection. This is kind of different from other game studios, since after doing two or three sequels to an original game, you'd usually see them move onto something different since they probably got tired of making almost the same thing. But with FromSoft, I guess they just got really really good at doing what they do.

I've heard "rocket launcher" and "from soft" in the same sentence because I grew up on Armored Core.

That exploding treasure bit. Literally the same thing happens at the end of the Pate and Creighton Sidequest.

One fun fact I noticed with this game, the previous Shadow Tower and King's Field: the Ancient City was that you had a deadly woman with a scythe. All before we had Priscilla, Nashandra, and Sister Friede. Auriel/Rurufon (the scythe woman, basically the same character with the former being her name in the first Shadow Tower, the later her name in Abyss) may as well be the one to start it.

I absolutely LOVE the idea of guns mixed with old fantasy like this. The idea of a big-bad boss just showing up and then... you just shoot his head off is hilarious and with how it mixes with the rest of the game, I think it's actually done pretty damn well!