doshmanziari

[doshmanziari]

Just a few edits I'd made of screenshots from Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance, and which I found lying around in a folder.

[doshmanziari]

Hi, everyone.

I've republished two of my pieces on Substack, in addition to supplementing one. The first, "The Soul of Place", was originally published on the now-defunct website No Escape. I was compelled to repost it both for the purpose of preservation and because its subject matter was brought to mind for me when viewing the videos of YouTube user Any Austin, who has a variety of uploads granularly exploring videogame sites.

The second, "Castlevania: Curse of Darkness; or: It’s Just Like Symphony of the Night, Except Not At All!", compiles and edits a four-part series of posts from here and adds another section to the end. I suppose seasonality is what directed me to focus upon something Castlevania, even if it's a reprise.

Thanks for reading!

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Hey, everyone. In case you are unacquainted with it or missed these publications -- and I know the topics are not those on which I've built most of my reading audience -- I have two relatively new essays available to read on my Substack page. The one is a fairly dense exploration of the presence and role of counter-intelligence within the UFO mythos; the other is a more free form walk through the aspects and implications of persistent, melancholic dream spaces.

[doshmanziari]

Just a few edits I'd made of screenshots from Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance, and which I found lying around in a folder.

[doshmanziari]

Hi, everyone.

I've republished two of my pieces on Substack, in addition to supplementing one. The first, "The Soul of Place", was originally published on the website No Escape. I was compelled to repost it because its subject matter was brought to mind for me when viewing the videos of YouTube user Any Austin, who has a variety of uploads granularly exploring videogame sites.

The second, "Castlevania: Curse of Darkness; or: It’s Just Like Symphony of the Night, Except Not At All!", compiles and edits a four-part series of posts from here and adds another section to the end. I suppose seasonality is what directed me to focus upon something Castlevania, even if it's a reprise.

Thanks for reading!

[doshmanziari]

Hey, everyone. In case you are unacquainted with it or missed these publications -- and I know the topics are not those on which I've built most of my reading audience -- I have two relatively new essays available to read on my Substack page. The one is a fairly dense exploration of the presence and role of counter-intelligence within the UFO mythos; the other is a more free form walk through the aspects and implications of persistent, melancholic dream spaces.

[doshmanziari]

I seem to be in the spirit of dunking on the most irritating contingent of the so-called Souls community (i.e., "Souls veterans"). Yesterday, I did a YouTube search for Dark Souls 2, and these are the first results I got. Guys: this is crazy. Dark Souls 2 has been stuck in a discursive loop for a literal full decade and it pretty much all has to do with Matthewmatosis putting out a critique within the first month or two of the game's release. No long-form analysis since has been able or willing to escape the vortex of "Is it GOOD or NOT GOOD (relative to Dark Souls, my Favorite Game of All of the Times)???" We just keep getting hours-long meandering "hot takes" about how it's either "better" or "worse" than some collective mentality thinks it is.

This pseudo-critical loop has been on my mind because what is also the most irritating vocal contingent of Elden Ring's playerbase has been doing nothing except recycling the half-assed observations deriving from Joseph Anderson's equally premature word-vomit. I've been looking through various videos having to do with certain bosses for Elden Ring's DLC, and one of the most persistent comments is "lmao trash boss with nearly unavoidable attacks." Sorry, guys: there is no such thing as "nearly unavoidable"; either the attack is avoidable, or it isn't, and it's up to you to clear the gap if it is. And this was the whole thing about Anderson's critique -- framing the game in a way that was coming from the perspective of someone who's mad that they can't do exactly what they did against Ornstein and Smough to first-time a brand new boss, and, instead of trying to figure out what's happening, decides that the game is exclusively for a new class of Übermensch.

I dunno, man. I'm tired of this framework for new media criticism: bloated, disorganized videos responding to the item in question as soon as it hits, and petrifying the general interpretative mentality of the people doing most of the opining, because a majority of the audience is just waiting for an authority figure to make up their mind for them in a way that's convenient to their prejudices. Folks nowadays might rightly wonder what import or responsibility the critic has to play anymore; but I'd say that these videos are excellent examples of fairly powerful criticism which has been exceeding textual norms for a while, and has been poisoning various wells in a way that mostly can't be dealt with because of the convoluted format and the exceptional power of group-think on online spaces.

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Hi, everyone. I just released a new album on Bandcamp.

ARRANGEMENTS is a curated album of arrangements written over the course of about fourteen years. To me, it seems impossible to conceive of a composer who was not compelled to begin their creative journey through the work of others; so I see this album as, on the one hand, a tribute to certain composers whom I admire, with Hitoshi Sakimoto finding the greatest representation among the group. On the other hand, I think this album demonstrates the scope of what's taken my fancy, leading me to spontaneously rework pieces which otherwise don't occupy much of my mental space -- such as the theme music for the YouTube channel MemeAnalysis, or a song from The Little Mermaid. Some tracks have been modified to sound a little more dynamic or balanced in their mixing, but in most cases the pieces have remained untouched since their compositional completion. The tracklist is roughly organized according to a chronological order.

Credits: Anonymous, Johann Sebastian Bach, Gabriel Eduardo, Masashi Hamauzu, Andrew Hewitt, Yasuhiro Ichihashi, Kenji Ito, Richard Jacques, Jana Kurta, Alan Menken, Hitoshi Sakimoto, Nobuo Uematsu, Yasuhisa Watanabe, Michiru Yamane

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Something so perfectly, humorously irritating about the neat resonance between the theme of cycles and the occlusion of history in FromSoftware's games and the perpetual pattern in the playerbase of people who deem each new game or its DLC as "impossible", "unfair", a "betrayal of core principles", always forgetting that this is exactly how they behaved the last time.

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For one of my recent exhibitions, a friend helped me build a bunch of frames, and he asked that I do a piece for him in return. I went for something similar to the colorful work I was making during the later months of last year, drawing on a mixture of shingle style and farm buildings. The linework was done using a bunch of different ink pens, and most of the color comes from watercolor paints. In my head, I had the image of a building which appeared to progress from a summery to an autumnal palette, as if the building were alive and getting ready for fall alongside the surrounding plant life.

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Shadow of the Erdtree: Some Reflections

Well, folks, since no one asked, here are some thoughts I've had while exploring Elden Ring's add-on, Shadow of the Erdtree.

The existence of an alternate shadow realm has solidified my conviction that what Elden Ring is depicting on micro and macro scales is the phenomenology of etheric bodies -- extending even to the moon, the double of which is visible from the Moonlight Altar plateau (this is reflected by Rellana's Twin Moons spell). Each of these bodies possess a regulating function. Although each might be generally described as doppelgänger, the occult scientist Rudolf Steiner wrote of the Doppelgänger proper as its own sort of body, responsible for the tension between aspiration and temptation. It's interesting to me that this is such a major preoccupation of the game, because it indicates a layer of esoteric involvement, on the part of Elden Ring's narrative conceptualizations, that I don't think anyone in the so-called lore community has picked up on yet. The shadow realm helps explicate the otherwise inexplicable Godefroy the Grafted, too.

Various details have also strengthened my impression that the revolt against Nature we see in Elden Ring is a revolt against motility -- motility being the ultimate enemy of utopia: a human conceptualization reliant upon infinite stasis. In the base game, I think we see this revolt most profoundly in the narrative of Ranni, who first abandons her own flesh and then strives towards the realization of an Age of Stars, that "thousand year voyage under the wisdom of the Moon." Although the Seedbed Curse represents its own revolt against Nature, it remains within the organic order. Ranni's vision is of the inorganic and remote. And I don't think it's unrelated that, in certain esoteric cosmological systems, the moon stands as most distant from the Absolute.

The colors of the landscapes and sky are amazing: vivid, autumnal, and strange. These palettes have only made me dislike the game's rain effect all the more, which does not deepen the arboreal colors (as it should) but drains all surfaces of color and sets them into a depressing, bland grayscale. To say that the rain is a part of why I consider Raya Lucaria to be Elden Ring's low-point in the realm of major level design could be seen as a trivial complaint, but visual drudgery will wreck even the best schemes; and Raya Lucaria is as far as you can get from that anyway. FromSoftware has done fine with types of snow (see, e.g., the Frigid Outskirts or Painted World of Ariandel), but I think they've yet to figure out rain, among some other graphical technicalities.

The forges are among my favorite instances of discrete level design, even if, or maybe because, they tend to contain only two or three enemy types, feature no bosses, and severely scale back the level of challenge. I happened upon one yesterday that I did find a little dull, but the other two were wonderful, brief, atmospheric knots, quiet sequences of colossal architecture, that sort of evoked shades of Stonefang Tunnel from Demon's Souls. On that note, I'd call special attention to the forges' theme music. The only other piece of music from the DLC that's gotten my attention is the theme for Belurat.

Plants are People, Too.

Torrent is just... a terrible inclusion for this game. It's maybe obvious enough to not warrant being said, but -- any design decision has to be evaluated on what it contributes to the system it's been set into, and Torrent adds nothing outside of the occasional, brainless convenience. I could maybe see an argument for Torrent's presence if he had some emotionally charged narrative integration, maybe like what Shadow of the Colossus did. Without this, Torrent is nothing but a tool which perpetually problematizes the overworld's scale (a bit too big, yet no fun to traverse at high speed) and trivializes all of its gauntlets on a potential and actual level far worse than anything the Spirit Ashes could ever do. Better to me would've been if the only way to use a mount were by defeating a mounted knight without killing their horse and then sneaking up to the runaway to gain ownership of it.

I'm finding the map much more engaging than that of the base game because of how it plays with abstractions and builds anticipation through that. One part of the map, for instance, shows a bunch of trees with red leaves. Reaching this place reveals these "trees" to be enormous red flowers. Another section shows pink, purple, and orange specks. What are these? And what are the gray, finger-like lumps erupting from the mass next to it? I've also found it tough to figure out how to progress from one plane to another because of how densely stacked and knobby the continent's features are, so consulting the map has been helpful in a way I rarely experienced with the base game's.

Love how much the Ancient Ruins of Rauh resemble The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, from the explosion of verdure, to the crude, architectural naivety defining the pseudo-Gothic structures.

With Shadow of the Erdtree, I keep coming up against an unresolvable simultaneity like the one mentioned above regarding the overworld. There's a lot of good level design to be found here among the dungeons, castles, and forts, yet the abundance and enormity of it all seems to have deprived the game of significant contrasts, and those special spatial moments, which I found much easier to locate and reflect upon with, say, Dark Souls or Bloodborne. Sure, the sky-piercing spiral of Enir-Ilim is a sight to behold; but soon enough the sequences of grand staircase upon grand staircase, great bridge upon great bridge, creates a perpetual climatic grandiosity that diminishes the very effect of a climax (and I'm not even sure that Enir-Ilim is the DLC's intended final location). Anor Londo or the Nightmare of Mensis could feel special because the qualities and features of their spaces stood apart from everything else. Elden Ring, I think, has gotten itself into a predicament by trying to one-up its internal material and all prior FromSoftware games through the enormity of its scale -- and challenge. More and more, I've been craving a new project from them that resets these terms of engagement, even while enjoying the consistency of the material at hand.

That's all for now! In time maybe I'll turn these thoughts to an essay for my Substack page, perhaps with a focus on the first two points.

[doshmanziari]

A few sketches done over the past several days, going over some possibilities for a commissioned piece. Most of the finished work I've done lately has kind of subordinated the architectural elements, so it's been good to reorient my focus. I really enjoy this kind of "exquisite corpse" method of composition; it never stops being exciting to contrast the vernacular with the formal, and seeing what monstrous oddities emerge onto the page.

[doshmanziari]

Here's one of my most recent pieces, entitled "The Veil Parted." Below you can see the rough draft, and one perhaps unlikely point of inspiration: a drawing by Edward Gorey, entitled "Cat Fancy."

Not seen here are some 17th century designs for beds by Daniel Marot, which have been on my mind for a while because of their visual sumptuousness and suggestions of death, comparable in certain ways to catafalques and functioning as sites of sleep -- its own sort of death. When rendered as it is in my drawing, the bed becomes a theatrical and ambiguous mass of lumps and folds, bridging nature and artifice.

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Here's an exclusive sneak-peek at a rough draft vs. final draft comparison, showing how certain details or features are omitted or added along the way. The sketches were first made in mid-2023, while the finished drawings were done in early 2024. The latter were included as part of recent group show in New York, featuring monchromatic drawings.

I pretty rarely move linearly from an inked rough draft to a final draft. Usually I'll just sketch out an idea on newsprint, and then come back to it later when it feels like it's time to give it the proper treatment on some good toothy paper. "Later" could mean some months, a year, or several years. The first piece is entitled "Trifocal Beakbundt"; the second, "Mandorla Nymfaeum."

You can find more examples of my artwork on my artist website and Instagram page.

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The evolution of an idea, which first came to me over a year ago while looking at a melted candle. The third image is among my most recently finished drawings, with the addition of some watercolor for the green and red portions. One of the primary roles of art is the perception of analogy, and the creation of new associations between otherwise disparate things: here, a sunken candle which becomes a sort of sheath for a fungal-columnar growth.

You can follow the progress of my work on Instagram, if you aren't already, where I typically post once a week or so.

[doshmanziari]

Two (relatively) recent and worthwhile considerations of FromSoftware soundtracks

As I mentioned a few months ago, I supplemented and republished an older essay on the music of Demon's Souls, the Dark Souls series, and Elden Ring, which you can read here. And I figure it's worth bringing up again, since I'm recommending two videos on the same general subject for a mini-post here.

To begin: Loopine, one of whose videos I've linked before, came out with a video, entitled "How Elden Ring Surpassed the Dark Souls OST", arguing that Elden Ring's clearer and deeper sound design puts it above Dark Souls 3's score. I find Loopine's analysis according to production unusual, appreciable, and clearly articulated; and, contrary to most media criticism solely being the self expelling thoughts, Loopine also conducts a small-scale experiment with other people regarding musical recognition — an experiment that, were it to be applied on a large scale, could yield very interesting results. Even so, the final thought I continue to have here is that the scores to Elden Ring and Dark Souls 3 are so comparable in their aggressive roteness (or rote aggressiveness?) that sound design can't possibly make that large of a difference.

Let me kinda diverge for a moment to remark on the trend Loopine mentions of "REAL CLASSICAL GAME COMPOSER CONDUCTOR REACTS TO DARK SOULS/ELDEN RING MUSIC" videos, just to say: first, how weird that videogame culture at large continues to suffer from this sort of media envy, awaiting the representatives of "real" art-forms to recognize an Undertale theme, or whatever. There seems to be the presumption that a certain kind of professional occupation necessarily yields novel insights; and that such professional appreciation somehow enforces an objective qualitative status upon the art. Did Bach admire the work of Vivaldi? Sure. Does that mean that I have to "admit" that Vivaldi's music is great? Uh... no. But, more than that, I find these videos confusing, given their emphasis on the quality of effectiveness — because a large part of my critical argument is that most tracks for the Dark Souls sequels and Elden Ring are highly ineffective.

A possible reason for this stark divergence of opinion is that, perhaps, most of the people featured on these videos haven't spent much time with the games, and so they miss the more particular details; and they also do not examine the soundtracks as a whole, both internally and according to FromSoftware's relevant catalogue, and lose sight of a bigger picture which reveals the tracks' interchangeable identities. On its own, Yuka Kitamura's theme for Lady Maria might seem extraordinary, and specially suited to that confrontation; when played right after the two-dozen others like it from Dark Souls 3 and Elden Ring... well.

From here, then, I'm going to recommend Crunchy's comparison of the original Demon's Souls soundtrack to the remake's. Being almost 3.5 hours long, and having no script prepared, it is, in a sense, the opposite to Loopine's. The length is not necessarily to the comparison's benefit. I think the video's maker would admit that, eventually, it becomes difficult to sustain the fresh particularities of criticisms made earlier on, because the offenses are fairly consistent. Since I left a comment on the video, I'm going to just quote that comment here:

This is a good musical analysis. Most of the comparative critiques I've come across couch the difference in terms of "taste", meaning that they tend to miss the contextual dimension. I think that it can be argued that the remake's music even fails on its own terms: the elaborateness of the reimaginings suggests that you're battling highly complex bosses with multiple phases, and that's not the case at all. With some of these tracks, I feel like half of the respective boss fight might have gone by during the intro. Given the general orchestral approach, I have the impression that the composer was probably drawing on Bloodborne's OST as the standard, since that was the last FromSoftware title prior to the remake which utilized an actual orchestra for pretty much its entire score; but, of course, Bloodborne's OST is communicating something very different from the world of Demon's Souls. Shrieking, slamming, grotesquely dark horror is definitively out of line, just as the needless graphical elaborations turn a brutal and austere world into a series of decked-out theme parks. I continue to be confused by most of FromSoftware's musical decisions for these games. For instance: why hire Motoi Sakuraba as your composer for Dark Souls? Nothing about Sakuraba's résumé recommends him as a composer of any sort of orchestral music. Was he just an affordable, "reliable" option? [Crunchy provided his own response to this: "I think Sakuraba was hired mainly because he had a relationship with Bandai, who published DS1."] How so much of a game like Elden Ring can be particularly crafted, while 85% of the music is a bundle of atmospheric non-events and "epic" slop, is baffling. Miyazaki's role here seems strangely incompetent, and out of line with the image of the man who pushes these teams to exceed aesthetically generic impulses.

(Parenthetically, I'd call readers' attention to Crunchy's videos on Elden Ring. I've explored just a few, but each stands among the most interesting and informed analyses of the game's esoterica I've come across so far) — OK. That's all for now. Bye!

[doshmanziari]

While returning to a piece I've been working on since last year on the question of what constitutes a reasonable challenge in game design, I've been thinking about the “perennial” discourse on difficulty FromSoftware's relatively recent titles resurrect each time a new one comes out — in particular, this idea that the difficulty should always be “intuitive." The idea seems to be a way of applying a sort of hindsight bias, casting every prior game as both The Hardest Game Ever and yet eminently predictable (with Dark Souls 2 as perhaps occasionally situated as an outlier in this regard). I was reminded of this contradictory sentiment while viewing the video above — which, just so you know, is not a 2.5-hours monologue, but a condensed, boss-centric playthrough of Dark Souls 3, done with the purpose of answering the question posed by the video's title.

Said differently, the contradiction we find is that people want these titles to be able to evolve in the challenges they present, but they also don't want them to be "unrealistically" hard. There is this notion that there is a kind of pure way to play, which stems from a purity of design, and that playing this way should come easily, intuitively, upon each new challenge. But! — you actually can't have all of those things. And with each new FromSoftware release, so many people seem to forget how the prior release, once lambasted for having finally crossed the threshold of absurd difficulty, has since been resituated as more or less reasonable, with the newer release now being so unfair that baby must cry, and may cry forever.

Is it not strange to go onto the Fextralife wiki and see comments about how Elden Ring's larger opponents are "unrealistically" fast? or to hear, in a video about Malenia, anger over bosses not conforming to imaginary symmetries of allowances? — as if it's just way too mean when a boss introduces an asymmetrical mechanic (despite the player being able to introduce their own asymmetries which far exceed any one boss')? And this persistent belief that the game is full of "unavoidable" attacks — obviously, this would forbid the possibility of perfect all-boss playthroughs; yet, even if there were some unavoidable attacks, why would that be unforgivable? A lifebar exists to make room for error, or the unexpected. Hypothetically, it also makes room for more malicious and surprising sorts of design. I think that the inability to enjoy cruder and nastier situations — such as those in Dark Souls 2 (especially Scholar of the First Sin) — implies a humorless prudishness rooted in prescriptive expectations. In fact, I think that Dark Souls 3 suffers from a lack crudities and inconveniences. Immaculateness is spread over the game like a waxy sheen, and one senses a loss of struggle and texture.

We have to be careful when we say that this or that thing is a "betrayal" of core design principles, because a closer examination may show that either those design principles never really existed, or that, if they did (to certain extents), a strict maintenance of them would only lead to a stagnation of design. In some cases, we may find that what is taken to be an aspect of one of these games is in fact an effect of the surrounding culture, which reinforces a kind of perception of the relevant media. Certainly, this remains powerfully at play for the first Dark Souls, such that, for instance, Demon's Souls tends to be excluded from the picture. Elden Ring came out when I was no longer compelled to spend much time learning its bosses' particularities for very long; but I suspect that the loudest whining about Elden Ring being the coffin of FromSoftware's Core Design Principles has mostly come from people who were soundly put in their place after thinking that the ability to own Dark Souls 3's (mostly brain-dead) bosses would automatically transfer over to a new game of similar build. Maybe we'll have to wait for this Shadow of the Erdtree DLC for FromSoftware to "finally" transgress (again), and for Elden Ring to, like all the ones before it, be seen as just fine.