TBSkyen's "Boss Designs of Dark Souls" - Blighttown Analysis
Please read the first post for context on the nature of this posting.
To summarize: This post is about my endeavors in reblogging (or in this case, reposting links of) personally interesting analysis and speculation on the Soulsborne series for fanfic reasons. Here I am sharing a personal favorite of mine, TBSkyen's YouTube series "The Boss Designs of ...", which I recommend checking it out for yourself. I'll be posting the YouTube links of his videos, with timestamps and a transcript for his analysis section, while including additional things like an interesting comment from his viewers, reference of in-game models/concept art of the bosses, relative item descriptions for these bosses, amongst other things.
Here is the link to the seventh episode of The Boss Designs of Dark Souls, focusing on descending the boss of environment designs, Blighttown:
Timestamp, transcript and interesting comment/s below the cut:
TIMESTAMP:
0:00-36:40 Playthrough | 36:45 Analysis
ANALYSIS TRANSCRIPT:
"Okay, so, let's talk about Blighttown, not so much as a level or a gameplay area but let's talk about Blighttown as a character and especially let's talk about it in relationship to the character of the other areas that we've been through so far, because like I've already mentioned, most of Dark Souls so far has featured us running through the ruins of the old human empire.
Like going through castles and battlements and barracks in the Undead berg and the Cathedral and killing the Bell Gargoyles and so on and even the Darkroot Garden which is this overgrown place, is still characterized largely by order, like it's overgrown, sure, but it's not chaotic. It's very healthy, it's very well put together, it's very orderly, you have a clear path forward pretty much at all times and it's still dominated by the ruins of man's old empire. Blighttown is a completely different animal, its character is completely different, this is not some austere ruin telling the story of an empire that once was, this is a chaotic, screaming, howling mess built by a madman like it, and given that the boss at the bottom of it is called "Chaos Witch Quelaag", that really reflects her personality, I think, or at least her title very well because Blighttown is just chaos, it's just these rickety old structures that are put together every which way with no sense of structural integrity and even fences that are built along the sides of the platform to just kind of just stack some sticks inside of each other until they stand more or less.
It's rickety, it's chaotic, it is completely full of blind dead ends and, you know, blind angles, and you are encouraged by the presence of items in the environment to just jump; just jump, just see if you can make it, see if you can get to that item down there that you want, just go for it, it's fine, we promise you're not gonna fall down and die maybe. It encourages you as the player even to be chaotic in your approach to the environment to - instead of doing the safe Dark Souls thing which is to not try and do platforming with the clunky-ass controls - to be a little bit crazy, to go jumping off a ledge, taking leaps of faith everywhere and that's the character of the environment, is that it is essentially, like it's a more effective visualization of the idea of an insane asylum than I've ever seen in any horror game, really, because the environment itself is reflective of the kind of demented attitude that it inflicts on you, like it forces you to either you play it completely, just desperately, massively, passionately, rationally safe (which is what I tried to do for most of my run through) or else you embrace the madness, you go jumping off ledges, you go like finding weird shortcuts and you go charging past enemies and you just go crazy.
And the thing that happened to me as I was playing through Blighttown, because of all the frustrations, because of all the dead ends, because of the many, many deaths that I took, most of which I've actually kind of had to cut out of the video because they were just me dying, going back to a bonfire, dying, go back to bonfire, never getting anywhere. I got so angry, like, I got so angry, I got frustrated, I got deeply impatient, and I just had so much trouble controlling myself because I just kept being frustrated and I kept being kind of blindsided by the enemies of Blighttown, by the architecture of Blighttown, by the layout of Blighttown and essentially, to a small extent, Blighttown drove me a little bit crazy, like, and that's the thing that I'm talking about when I talk about the character of the environment is that this is there, you don't have to be crazy to go through Blighttown, but it helps.
And I think that's very effective, because like I did not get that much of an emotional sense from any of the other environments I was traveling through so far in Dark Souls, like none of them really had an emotional impact on me, they were, you know, gorgeous and melancholic and they were sort of "oh it's very sad that there used to be a nice empire and now it's gone and stuff" but not really on a visceral, like physical level, and that comes down of course also just to the extreme frustration of the enemies that are placed in Blighttown, like climbing up ladders, hiding behind things, ganging up on you, the little goddamn dog creatures that can breathe fire at you all of a sudden, like all kinds of surprises hanging around every corner, and probably I was also a little bit under leveled, at least in terms of my items, to go through Blighttown because the enemies were really sponging up my damage but all of it just contributed to this feeling of descending into madness.
And that's when the environmental storytelling of Blighttown comes in also, which is something again we touched on a little bit in the main video, but you are heading down to the foundations of the empire here, this is what lies below all those grand castles, what lies below all those enormous castle towns, the barracks, all of that stuff that all of this is built on, and what it's built on, as it turns out, is poison. It's built on a poison swamp which is not, I would say, not a particular subtle way to communicate that maybe the human empire was never as great as they'd like to imagine, maybe it was never actually something that had any chance of lasting, maybe it was doomed from the start because it was built on poisoned foundations. And this is where you find Quelaag, this is where she dominates, where she rules, and the interesting thing about her is that I completely missed her lair like for quite a while... but I was so focused on not wanting to go into the poison water that I just thought, "oh I can just go around the thing" and I never noticed the mound until the moment... where I see that...
And the mound itself is also kind of interesting because Quelaag infests this place, right, that's very obvious like she's not part of the environment down there, she's infesting it down there, she has a nest down in that environment, she has that big-ass mound with all the spikes jutting out of it, looks completely out of place in a natural - it even has a different color scheme than much of the rest of the environments, got that very bright dirt going on and the dark sort of wooden(?) spikes, I think, maybe... which shows her off as less a natural inhabitant of this environment because nobody is a natural inhabitant of this environment, nothing in Blighttown - when you went through Darkroot Garden, for example, the wood men/ents or whatever the heck they were that lived in that environment and there's the two-headed snake things and sort of the ancient giants of the old civilization, all of them felt like natural fits for that particular place, and the same thing goes for the Undead Burg and stuff like that, like all of the enemies you encounter there are pretty natural fits for the kind of environment in which you find them, even the armored boar looks like the kind of beast of war that some ancient war-like civilization would gave put armor on and let's make it a terrible thing.
But as you descend into Blighttown, you are - like the first thing you're confronted with is that giant poison club wielding madman creature... with a sack cloth over his head, he's not- he seems like the kind of person who would be a natural inhabitant of a town like Blighttown but he doesn't suit the foundation to Blighttown, like again Blighttown is this rickety structure that's just kind of climbing up the foundations of the empire, all these grand pillars and these grand vaulted halls are all being essentially colonized by these rotting mad men and undead creatures and God knows what else, and the deeper and deeper you go the more you run into insectoid creatures, like first of all the little annoying flying mosquito bug creatures... and then the fire-breathing six-legged spider things... which both of them presage the idea of Quelaag who is indeed, as same as Blighttown is kind of a hybrid between the foundations of the human empire and just this crawling, skittering infestation that is climbing up from below.
Quelaag too, is both human and terrible, you know, skittering beast-insectoid spider creature and the little fire-breathing bugs presage her also just by breathing fire, which is a thing that the dogs do and also all the torches that litter Blighttown which is just everywhere, torches in an environment made entirely from wood which seems like a weird choice but again, communicating this idea that, okay, fire might be some kind of environmental themes going on here and all of it makes for a completely different experience from anything else that I've been doing in Dark Souls so far, the darkness of Blighttown is also kind of an important point.
It seemed to be that depending on where you were in Blighttown, the engine would switch between letting you see quite a decent distance and then sometimes it would just go so you would be emanating a little bit of light as though you were carrying some kind of a lamp and the rest of the environment would be very dark. And Blighttown limits your visibility a lot in that way, in doesn't really allow you to see ahead, it doesn't allow you to plan ahead, it doesn't allow you to see clearly where anything is or where you're supposed to go, which is why I got lost multiple times while running through the place, and again, it forces you into this mindset of just kind of "I guess I can't really make a plan of where I'm going, I'm just gonna have to wander and see what the hell happens and try to do my best to muddle my way through"... everywhere else in Dark Souls we've been so far, you've always been able to see ahead, you've always been able to see what you were gonna be dealing with, you always been able to see, you know, where the oath was and the environments were designed such that the path emerged relatively naturally from what you were doing but Blighttown just feels like you're just having a wander, like you're just wandering around for "oh here's a ladder, I'll try that one" and running into dead ends and stuff.
All of it just contributes to making Blighttown like the first environment that really fights you, that really says, "no, you, you're not welcome here, you don't belong here" and this entire environment and this entire place will try to destroy you, it will try to screw with your head, it will try to confuse you, it will try to turn you around and it will try to kill you. And that to me is genuinely very, very interesting."
And here's a few viewers' comments that I thought were particularly noteworthy:
"Blightdown is VERY similar to an area in Demon’s Souls called the Valley of Defilement. The major difference between the two is that the Valley of Defilement is more obviously a village where people live. It’s got straw beds where the defiled victims sleep, butchered animals, and a large village with guards guarding their temple of worship. Even the swamp at the bottom is contextualized with giant sewage pipes dumping waste into the swamp below. Blighttown on the other hand is, as you said, completely nonsensical. And that’s not a mark against it because, as you imply in your analysis, *that’s the point*. It’s a descent into madness, a descent into hell. It’s so complicated and unforgiving that it becomes not a holistic location, but an enemy of its own."
"I think you were kinda cooking in saying Blighttown is a boss fight. Quelaag doesn't fit Blighttown nearly as much as she fits Demon Ruins and Lost Izalith, considering she has direct connections to both those areas in being a Daughter of Chaos. So you could make the argument that both of the hellish areas have 2 bosses each, one at the start and one at the end. So Lost Izalith starts with Centipede demon and ends with Bed of Chaos, demon ruins starts with Quelaag and ends with Demon Firesage, and then Blighttown is its own boss fight. It's not a perfect interpretation, but it's an interesting one and in terms of the game's structure, I think it makes a good amount of sense."
Here's some in-game references of the area and concept art too:
