Before getting into the meat of
Lothric Castle in Dark Souls
III, the Player is given an opportunity to head into the castle’s garden
area, now a poisonous wasteland for Puss of Mans and powerful Lothric guards
standing at attention in defense of…something. It’s unclear what, at first,
until you see the precariously placed guard standing dead center in front of a
descent of stairs. He’s not guarding something, he’s guarding the man of the
area: the Consumed King of the garden. Given how we’ve been looking for Prince
Lothric, it’s only fitting that this should be King Lothric, the Prince’s father, and the
one whose soul we’re searching for. As it would turn out, Oceiros is instead a
completely optional boss leading to another optional area. Lothric is indeed
the one we’re hunting, but, why is Oceiros here? And why isn’t he the main villain?
Oceiros, as we understand him, is a
terrible king and an even worse father. He has two spawn, Lorian and Lothric,
but doesn’t care for either of them while he goes on a quest for power: the
power of the dragon. He tries to master the Path of the Dragon and experiments
on so many in his conclave that his castle starts to corrode and he may have
even ignored a giant war that was being fought before him. He ignored his wife,
who had to flee with their young son, Ocelotte. Oceiros was driven so mad that
he even thought Ocelotte was with him when he engages the Player in combat.
And he should be the final villain
of the Lothric storyline.
There are things that need to be
changed if he is to be the final boss. For one: his boss fight needs to be
improved. As it stands it’s just a frustrating fight against a sentient dragon.
Sure he moves around a bit more than other dragon battles we’ve seen, but it
isn’t particularly engaging. The Twin Princes fight is a much better fight,
yes, but there isn’t as much weight to it, I’ve found, with the Lorian twist.
It would have been way more
interesting for the Player to defeat the princes, only to be told that the true enemy, the one behind all the
corruption and decay in Lothric, has yet to be found: their father, Oceiros.
This would then take the player down the Path of the Dragon, trying to discover
just what it was Oceiros was up to before confronting him somewhere else.
The game, as I’ve mentioned before,
needed to apply more emphasis on one of its two stories and just stick with it.
Aldritch and the Lothric bloodline do have intertwining tales (especially if
you fall into the belief that Pontiff Sulyvahn was the scholar that corrupted
the Twin Princes) but not enough for a cohesive narrative. If we’d stuck with
just Lothric, the game would have been a bit more fluid. Oceiros would probably
have been a mandatory boss rather than an optional one.
I’m not sure why he’s optional,
either. It seems like the smaller details of the game get the main bosses while
huge aspects that actually speak to the dimension-warping abilities of the
realm get pushed to the side. I really have to fight the Dragonslayer Armor but
Champion Gundyr, and all the information he carries, I’ll never find on the
critical path? That’s so dumb!
Perhaps it’s optional because the
developers wanted the players to find out about it on their own and not be
guided to this revelation. But that also goes a bit against what Dark Souls has stood for. We don’t need a guiding
hand, we just need to find our way around. I bounced around the original areas
of Dark Souls just enough times to make my way to
Anor Londo, where things got a lot easier. Dark Souls II has a pretty tough first-area to
traverse for brand new players, what with there being so many paths that lead
you nowhere but to nice trinkets. Dark
Souls III is a much more
linear story than the previous two entries, it feels; so when the Player
discovers something on their own, it does feel like an accomplishment.
And I will admit I was surprised to
find Oceiros hiding away from everything in his large, overgrown room. It was
like finally finding the mad scientist in his secret lab. My question is why
he’s blocking us from the Untended Graves, and it’s possible that he believes
his family is there. We see worshippers of the Queen hanging out near the Estus
Ring in Untended Graves and it’s implied that Oceiros stole himself away and
practically abandoned the Twin Princes to their fate once he went to find a
“cure” for the bloodline.
Still, there’s too much mystery
surrounding Oceiros to make a fair assessment of him and what he’s really up
to. Why does he want to make the bloodline stronger? He discovers Seath the
Scaleless, or in this case “Seath the Paledrake” and wants to become powerful
like him, but, is that it? Just going power-mad?
DaveControl, a Youtuber who covers
“Souls” related topics, posits that this lust for power drove him mad to
parallel the story of Big Hat Logan, who also went mad with regards to Seath.
He even gets captured by the dragon, as we see in the Duke’s Archives of Dark Souls. He even suggests it
was the will of the Darkstalker Frampt that pushed Oceiros, and ultimately the
Twin Princes, toward their untimely demise.
I’d tend to agree if it weren’t for
the fact that the Sable Church of Londor has more of a say in this matter. The
dragons, after all, were not keen on the idea of a new age. Only Seath, promised
power by Lord Gwyn, went along with them. Londor has never been about the flame
and has also been guided by Frampt. My issue with this is that Oceiros seeks an
heir so to link the fire. There’s an obvious contradiction here. Why would he
search the power of the dragons in order to link the flame?
Well, what if he didn’t want the
power of the dragons themselves, but the power of one who has fought alongside
them? It’s quite odd, after all, that the Nameless King, Gwyn’s firstborn
erased from history books, should be in this game other than to give answers.
If Oceiros were to indeed invoke the Path of the Dragon where necessary, he
would find himself at Archdragon Peak just like the Player, and could very well
have met with the Nameless King.
Did any of that happen in-game? No,
it’s clarified that he went to the “heretic scholars” of the Grand Archives in
search of knowledge. Seath, and even Sulyvahn, has planted seeds of corruption
here, or at least Oceiros has let them in. The Crystal Mage is indicative of
Seath, as he was all about Crystal-magic; Sulyvahn could be implied to have
intervened through his Outrider Knight that guards a spell imperative to the
corruption of Lothric.
But if Oceiros were the main
villain, the story flips almost completely. Now we have a civil war on our
hands between father and son: one side, Oceiros, wishes for the flame to be
linked once more, whereas the otherside, the Twin Princes, wishes for nothing
to be done of it. One does not need to even bring in Frampt or Kaathe to see
that they are at play. The subtle hints of their statues in the castle could
imply their ongoing struggle, after one lost to the other in previous two
games. Now it’s their final battle, it would seem, and the Player finds
themselves locked in combat. Do you join Oceiros and link the flame or listen
to the Twin Princes, weak and afraid, and let the flame fade?
It still seems, though, that the
Twin Princes are critical to the story, even if Oceiros is the main bad guy.
And that’s fine. They’d be the second-to-last boss fight anyway, with the
Player needing their souls to activate the Lordvessel, or access the Kiln of
the First flame in a different way. The Player defeating the Twin Princes in
the main Dark Souls III is just to gain access to the Kiln and
make the ultimate decision, since the Twin Princes are doing nothing either
way.
Confronting Oceiros helps the
Player confront their decision before they must make it. Oceiros, mad with
power and not having heard of the Player (but they having heard of him throughout
the game) would be afraid for his son, who he thinks will be the one to link
the flame. Ocelotte, as we all know, has been gone for quite a while with Queen
Lothric, and is possibly dead as a result of Oceiros’s failed experiments. Once
the Player defeats him, his dying words will be for someone, anyone, to just
link the flame as he wanted for his family. Should the player do so, the Age of
Fire continues for a brief period longer, but the kingdom is in shambles and
perhaps a DLC could feature Londor taking over, but if the Player does not then
it’s ultimately the tragedy of Oceiros’s character.
Dark Souls III is a game that tried to be about gods and men when really
it should have focused on men trying to be gods. Oceiros was a mad king for
what he wanted and Lothric and Lorian thought themselves above all the
problems. Making Oceiros the primary antagonist of the game fixes several of
it’s narrative problems while also giving the player a primary objective beyond
just opening up the Kiln of the First Flame. In the main game, after the Twin
Princes are slain, the game is basically over. But if Oceiros were the primary
antagonist, and thereby the final boss, several new mandatory areas exploring
the truth of Lothric could have opened up, making for a much larger game.
And as a character he opens up tons
of interesting possibilities that can mirror previous bosses. King Vendrick
stowed himself away in his own tomb while Gwyn locked himself up in the Kiln of
the First Flame. If we find Oceiros a similar way, it would a nice air of
familiarity for a climactic battle. You want change? Fine. That’s what the rest
of the game is for.
Dark Souls is all about cycles: how things begin and end. It is not the Dr. Manhattan mentality of “Things never end” because in Dark Souls it’s all about trying to get to the
end. Oceiros going mad and trying to link the flame shows the ultimate
desperation: a king, like Vendrick, went mad to link the flame, like Gwyn, but
in a new twist completely corrupted his family that was otherwise innocent.
Vendrick’s queen was, I believe, already touched by the Dark. Lothric and
Lorian were persuaded away from the flame maybe since their youth, or maybe
once Oceiros abandoned them for Ocelotte. The game could have explored themes
of being a father as well as a king, and how Oceiros ultimately failed at
those. Or, just in a broad sense, the game could have been about family as well
as the cyclical nature of the world. Again, bring in the Nameless King, shed
some more of his backstory and make him relatable to Lothric and Lorian in how
his father cast him aside when he fought for the dragons. If you’re going to
want to incorporate Ornstein, then do it. But do something with it. It’s
implied, quite heavily, that Ornstein and the Nameless King were good friends,
even war buddies, and that he still cared for him even after his untimely
betrayal of Gwyn. It’s even possible that the Ornstein we fight in Anor Londo
in Dark Souls is just another of
Gwyndolin’s illusions, like the Silver Knights.
Instead, our main villain was…the
Soul of Cinder? The Sable Church of Londor? Aldritch? The Twin Princes? It’s
hard to say who we are to blame for what’s happened in Lothric. They all play a
part in spreading the corruption, but there isn’t the one person we fall back
to and claim, “Ah-ha! It was you!” In Dark
Souls, it’s clearly Gwyn. If he hadn’t linked the Flame, none of this would
happen. Gwyn is the reason the Player fights and struggles so much. In Dark Souls II it’s Nashandra, manipulating the
Player far more than Kaathe or Frampt in Dark
Souls, but still subtle enough to make you swing that much harder at her
during the final confrontation.
Dark Souls III lacks that critical focus that having Oceiros as a King
could have brought. The narrative and world are all over the place and it seems
the game is more focused on being Dark
Souls than it is on being Dark Souls III, the next
natural step in the world of “Souls.” Much as many would say that Dark Souls II is a weaker entry than the original,
the narrative was at least cohesive with theScholar of the First Sin edition and made things clearer as to
who was pulling the strings and why. Dark
Souls III, I don’t think, will have that sort of touch-up. Does it need it?
In the story department, yes, I would say so.
Consumed King Oceiros is an
interesting character not examined enough in Dark
Souls III. Learning more on him could have allowed us to learn more on the
makings of the kingdom and told exactly why we’re supposed to feel for these
characters. Thankfully there are strong enough moments in the Twin Princes boss
battle to instill some sense of pity before cutting them down, but it isn’t
enough for me to really get into the fight. It’s the climactic battle, yes, but
confronting Aldritch was way more satisfying once you take a step back and look
at the story and who has really been corrupting things. But he should
have his own game, and that’s a discussion for another time.
Main blog: wordofsean.blogspot.com
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