Dark Souls 3, for all of its faults of story getting cut, aspects not being elaborated on, and just a general sense of a messy development, has one of my favorite endings to a video game series. And overall it brings the culmination of the themes of the games into a beautiful yet sad message of the entropic nature of the world you play in.
Starting at 1 you are embroiled in a story of Gods and Dragons. We learn of Humans and how Gwyn was afraid of them, due to the Dark Soul they all inherently possessed , causing him to Link the Flame and serve as kindling for it. And then we are stuck in a quest of having to kill them in order to either continue a cycle started by the God of the Sun or become a Dark Lord and herald a new age.
2 is different in many ways, as it is a story that is both disconnected from 1 yet you feel the effects of its story all over as the Undead Curse is prevalent throughout the game, and you realize as you progress that there is no way for you to escape the Curse, with the only person who did that in some form becoming so detached from the World in the most literal way possible that he can’t even exist anymore. Along with that we learn of Gwyn’s “Sin”, from Aldia who dedicated himself more than anyone to the research of the World and we start to think more about the ramifications of Gwyn’s actions. And in the end the only choice you have is to either become someone who will link the flame again(not even doing it) or just leaving, choosing something else, with no idea what will happen.
And finally we have 3. This is the point where we start to realize why what Gwyn did was a “Sin.” Gwyn damned the world the second he decided to start the cycle. The world was not meant to be in a single state for so long, and while it usually would have just gone to another Age, the existence of the Flame at all made it so that as long as a single person made it there, the Age of Fire would just return. There would never be another age except the Age of Dark and the Age of Fire. And the Ringed City DLC portrayed the result of this perfectly. You discover the Pygmies after 3 games of knowing nothing about them but they don’t matter. You find the original Firelink and kill the last Demons but it doesn’t matter. You discover Gywn had another daughter, but that doesn’t matter. Because the illusion that any of it will ever mean anything to anyone is gone the second you step out of the door after meeting Filianore. There is no world, there is no more hope, there is nothing. You have reached the end of the world, seeing the ruins of Lothric and Anor Londo in the distance, and you realize that everything meant nothing.
And in the end, you find someone like you. An undead who was a slave to a cause they had no choice in. And 2 nobodies drawn together at the end of the world fight for something that no longer has any meaning to anyone, and will never have an impact on this world because you know for a fact that the world you spent 3 games loving will never have a happy ending. Siegward, Solaire, The Emerald Maiden, The Chosen Undead, The Bearer of The Curse, and The Ashen One, and Oscar. All of their efforts meant nothing because the world was damned the second Gwyn linked the flame.
And the only thing you can do is give the dregs of that which Gwyn feared the most to a little girl who paints a new world, all for the hope that one day that new world will be able to live free of the Curse you all bore, because after all, isn’t that all a Curse-bearer wants? Freedom?
(Also sorry if this was a bit weird of me to post I just NEEDED to say this at least once because of how much I love the series yet NOBODY talks about this from what I’ve seen, like the fact that the entire world was doomed by actions we never could have stopped is just so HARD HITTING)
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