A Dance That Loses Momentum - Overanalyzing and Reimagining a Dark Souls 3 Moment That Bugged Me

Is it just me, or does the Dancer’s introduction kind of suck?

Coming to Dark Souls 3 immediately from the first Dark Souls game is kind of an odd experience. Suddenly, you can roll faster. Suddenly, weapon upgrades make sense. From the very beginning of the game, you’re surrounded by NPCs who want to see you succeed in your quest, and have clear instructions about what that quest will be. In a word, DS3 is transparent: gone are the days of fucking around and finding out, having no idea what “humanity” does or what the hell you’re supposed to do with a “boss soul.”

For the most part, this is a good thing. It’s good game design. And plopping the player down into an unfamiliar, hostile world and daring them to figure it out is not the sort of thing that will necessarily work twice, especially when such a large part of DS3’s worldbuilding ethos stems from how deeply it is in conversation with DS1. So, though I honestly miss a lot of DS1’s weird jank and antagonistic relationship with the player, I overall enjoy DS3’s approach. It creates a smooth gameplay experience in which the player is, for the most part, struggling against the enemies and hazards in the world, not against baffling design decisions or obtuse mechanics that break immersion.

So, what happens when Dark Souls 3 actually tries to be jarring?

One of my favorite moments in the first game takes place in an area called the Duke’s Archives, the vast library of the dragon Seath the Scaleless. Exploring the first section of the Archives, the player will eventually be led up a long elevator and then down an ominous, crystalline hallway. Here, they will encounter Seath. This in itself is a surprise—Seath is supposed to be the final boss of this area, and it seems the player has barely explored what the area has to offer! —so when Seath turns out to be invulnerable, and quickly kills the player, it all makes sense. It’s a scripted death! You’ll get to fight Seath for real later in the Archives! This is just a little teaser! You’ll just have to run back to the tower, grab your lost souls, and find another way through the Archives, right?

Wrong! You do not respawn at the bonfire where you last rested. Instead, you wake up in jail.

The entire jail segment of the Duke’s Archives delighted me. It’s just a really fun and creepy scenario. There are many ways in which the game deliberately tries to stress you out in this area, but the two I want to focus on work together to destabilize the player and push them towards seeking a state of normalcy and safety.

Dark Souls on the whole does an excellent job of creating a push and pull between players feeling safe and unsafe. Oftentimes this feels like a seesaw or a scale. The further you get from a bonfire, the fewer Estus flask uses you have left, the more souls you have that you could potentially lose, the further the scale tips. The further the player ventures out into the unknown, they become more likely to die and more likely to suffer from that death (ie, not make it back to the place they died before to retrieve their souls). Dark Souls, then, is a game of perpetually seeking to restore that sense of safety. You return to a state of balance when you restore your health and turn your souls (temporary) into an upgrade (permanent).

When Seath’s guards throw you in jail, you lose that safety in two ways. First, you are cut off from warping to other bonfires. You are stuck in jail, and you’re going to have to fight your way out. Second, all your souls are way back in Seath’s tower. For some players this may not be a big deal, but for many (and certainly for me), the difficult enemies of the Archive would have given them a good deal of souls, and they hadn’t spent those souls before going up the tower because they weren’t anticipating a boss fight (especially not a boss fight you’re supposed to lose). But now you’re in jail, and you have no idea how to get back to the tower from here, and if you die even once, you’ve lost all those souls. That’s pretty stressful! It incentivizes careful, strategic play through a treacherous area, and creates a great sense of forward momentum: you are out of alignment with the way things should be, and you have a lot more to do than usual to regain your sense of safety.

Dark Souls 3 has a moment that, I believe, is trying to capture the same sort of feeling as being thrown in the Archives jail. Or perhaps it is more fair to say that the two scenes have a common affect they’re trying to evoke: the jarring feeling of being whisked farther away from safety than you would have liked. In the case of DS3, I don’t think it works. Here’s why.

DS3 lets you fight the second two Lords of Cinder—that is, Aldrich and Yhorm—in whichever order you like. Once you’ve defeated both, the game abruptly teleports you to the next area, Lothric Castle, so you can progress the story. In and of itself, I think this is a fun idea. It’s definitely a lot more dramatic than the last time two story-paths merged into one, and the reward was… dissolving an invisible wall on the other side of a bridge. (Or maybe I’m still just bitter about not realizing Crystal Sage was a non-optional boss until after I’d finished Catacombs. Skill issue!)

Here is how this scene progresses. You, the player, have just defeated either a very difficult boss (Aldrich) or a very easy boss (Yhorm). If Siegward helped you fight Yhorm, you get a moment to speak with him (and get all emotional about it). Then, suddenly: cutscene! A strange voice is calling to you and telling you something about Prince Lothric! Oh no, it’s story progression! You get transported to a church you visited at the beginning of the game, and the old lady there gives you some cryptic instructions, and then promptly dies, leaving you with a bowl that you’re apparently supposed to place at the foot of the statue right in front of you.

This is, obviously, disorienting. It’s also a big break from the way bosses usually go in DS3. After every boss, the game spawns a bonfire that you can use to rest, recuperate, and go back to Firelink Shrine to spend all the souls you gained from killing that boss. This gives the player some time to calm down from the excitement of a boss fight, and allows them to enter the next area feeling not only relatively safe, but exceptionally prepared: they might’ve leveled up, or made a new weapon with the last boss’s soul, or gotten any other sort of upgrade at Firelink.

Technically, you can still do this after you’re teleported into the church. You can leave! You can run over to Vordt’s bonfire and deal with all the stuff you got from the last boss. But, if you’re anything like me, the game’s momentum has gotten you hooked. And it’s so easy to just walk over to that statue! Just like it’s so easy to take the lift up to Seath’s tower, unaware that you’re about to hit a point of no return…

Before you even touch the statue, the doors of the church slam shut, and some sort of thing drops from the ceiling. It is slow, uncannily graceful, and extremely inhuman. This is the Dancer of the Boreal Valley, and she is the boss you must defeat to gain access to Lothric Castle.

The Dancer is hard. Very good boss fight. But hard. So I died, and respawned back in the Profaned Capital, and suddenly—all that momentum was gone. Unlike dying to a normal boss, there were now extra steps involved to getting back to safety, and none of it was nearly as exciting as the trek through the Archive jail. I had to go grab Yhorm’s bonfire, which the game had denied me before, then do a little run around Lothric Wall because I forgot where the church was (skill issue), then dip back into the Dancer fight only to homeward-bone away to Firelink with my 30k-odd souls. And then I went to go fight Dancer properly.

So, this setup is sort of strange. The clear intent is to essentially make the player fight two bosses back to back, with the second one (Dancer) appearing suddenly and unexpectedly after the first. But is that really what happens? After the initial shock of meeting Dancer, getting back to her (if you die, which you probably will) is weirdly complicated, doubly so if you’re invested in getting back your Yhorm souls. (Or Aldrich souls, I guess.)

I’ve laid out the Archives jail sequence above because I believe comparing the two helps illustrate a lot of what I find lacking about the Dancer’s introduction. Two key differences are: the presence of a “point of no return,” and the question of momentum.

Above, I compare triggering the Dancer boss fight to triggering the Seath scripted-death boss fight. Both are ultimately unexpected. Though in both cases the game uses various methods to alert the player that something is up, and gives them the opportunity to escape before anything happens, I would say that the sudden appearances of both Seath and the Dancer are meant as a kind of trap. In the case of Seath, this leads to Jail. The player has unwittingly walked into a point of no return, and must continually fight to get back to normalcy.

Should Dancer similarly be a kind of point of no return? Clearly she is not: you can easily warp out of the fight, as I did. Would it be fair to somehow trap players in the Dancer fight in the same way players get trapped in the Archives jail? I think this would be an interesting decision—and a bold one too, considering how much more lenient and non-troll-y DS3 is compared to DS1. Though I personally struggled less with Dancer than with Aldrich, she’s still a big point of difficulty for many players. There is a difference between trapping a player in the Archives jail—a place that I’m pretty sure you can escape without doing any combat, though it wouldn’t be easy—and somehow trapping a player such that they have to beat an entire boss to return to normalcy. Ultimately, I think that’s pretty unfair. It has the potential to be frustrating (and not in a fun way) if, say, the player is underleveled and would rather go farm souls before fighting Dancer.

So, maybe it’s important for there to be a way out of the Dancer fight that isn’t just “beat the boss.” I can accept that. In that case, is there a way to preserve the “trick” of the Dancer? That is to say, is there a way for the game to preserve the feeling of peril—the momentum of the game, the “trick” of suddenly having to fight your way through something you weren’t expecting—in a similar way that the Archives jail does?

First of all, there’s clearly a momentum-killer in this scenario that has nothing to do with the Dancer fight. That’s the fact that it’s so complicated to get back to the Dancer fight in the first place. As far as I can tell, this could be an easy fix. I think it would be very nice if there was a portal between Yhorm/Aldrich’s arena and Dancer’s arena that stayed active until you’d beaten Dancer. Die to Dancer, and you respawn not at the Profaned Capital or Anor Londo bonfire, but at the bonfire in the room of the boss you’ve just beaten. Having to run through the Profaned Capital and Lothric Wall (by way of Vordt’s arena) to get back to Dancer the first time was, as I mentioned above, both momentum-killing and also not very exciting. Ideally, the space between the bonfire and the boss should be hyping you up/making you anticipate the boss battle, not making you go “wait, how do I get back there?”

That being said, I can see an argument for making players go through Lothric Wall. Perhaps, by forcing the player to perform their own act of reorientation, the game reminds them of where they are and what is yet to come. After spending so much time away from the city of Lothric, I don’t think it’s a bad idea to re-introduce them to a familiar part of it (beyond the Dancer’s arena) before they enter into the long-foreshadowed Lothric Castle. This way, they get more of a chance to internalize how the world fits together. I’m not sure how my proposed fixes would preserve this intention, but it’s worth keeping in mind.

On the subject of bonfires, I have a second potential change in mind that I believe would preserve the jarring nature of the transportation to Dancer’s arena while also giving the player a moment of false respite. In the game, the transportation is near-immediate upon beating the previous boss. The fact that a bonfire appears, but you don’t get to sit at it, annoyed me. Of course, this is very much on purpose. That’s what makes the transportation jarring, and adds to the lack of safety you feel while in the church: after all, being far away from a bonfire is something that makes a player feel unsafe. But consider instead that this particular kind of instability stems not from not having sat at a bonfire, but from not knowing where the next bonfire is. All that not letting you sit at, say, the Yhorm bonfire accomplishes is respawning the player at the Profaned Capital bonfire—which is jarring in a bad way, as it seems to set you back progress-wise and gets your mind off the immediate threat of the Dancer. My proposed change in this regard is to let the player sit at the Yhorm/Aldrich bonfire, but not let them warp away from it, much like how the Archives jail bonfire is cut off from the rest. This refuses them the respite and upgrades provided by Firelink Shrine and creates a certain sense of dread. Sometime after the player gets up from the bonfire (perhaps when they try to exit the arena?), they are teleported to the church. Then, as stated above, dying to Dancer would respawn you at the previous boss bonfire (still with no warp ability, but if you really want to leave you can run out to the closest other bonfire), and an easy portal somewhere in the arena could take you back to Dancer.

This change would still ensure that the player feels unstable going into Dancer’s arena, as they would be carrying a whole lot of souls from the previous boss. The question now is whether it’s possible to preserve this lack of safety through subsequent fights. What if the game removed your ability to homeward-bone yourself out of the Dancer’s arena? To be clear, I don’t think this would actually be a good design decision, but it’s an interesting thought experiment. Homeward bones seem to work as a universal “way out,” so being denied the ability to use one here, especially in such a difficult and high-stakes encounter, would be pretty frustrating. But it would also mean there’s something at stake if you die to the Dancer: all those souls! That would disincentivize the player from going off and doing other, non-Dancer related activities, though they certainly could if they wanted to. Recall that the Archives jail is (in my opinion) especially exciting because of how it forcibly keeps the player from returning to safety/stability for an extended period of time. You want back the souls you lost to Seath? You want a bonfire you can warp away from? Get out of jail! In the same way, having all your souls trapped in the Dancer arena refuses the player full safety. Want to grab those souls and level up? Beat Dancer!

However, all this talk about potential re-imaginings of this scene is ignoring one important question. Is DS3 a game that benefits from having an extended period of destabilization, like the one in the Archives jail? As I discussed at the beginning, DS3 isn’t as mean a game as DS1 is. The player usually has a lot of options at their disposal, even when thrown into surprising and dangerous situations. Maybe the answer here is that DS3 should be meaner, and the strangeness of Dancer’s introduction stems from the fact that the devs didn’t want to commit to going full Seath. Or maybe I’m missing something crucial about DS3’s design by drawing too many comparisons to the Archives jail sequence. The important thing about the Dancer is that she is a surprise. She destabilizes the player, certainly, but perhaps that destabilization is meant to be momentary. The same is true of the game’s other prominent boss with a “trick” to her: Friede, who initially tricks you into thinking she has only two phases. Though I stand by all my ideas about preserving momentum through bonfire mechanics, not letting the player homeward-bone out of the arena would fail to preserve the game’s general ethos of giving the player options. Let the player compromise their own sense of momentum if they wish—but the game shouldn’t force that.

Anyway, on the subject of options, you can bypass the weird transition into Dancer entirely if you just kill the Priestess early and fight Dancer as the second boss. Thank you FromSoft.