User blog comment:Warden-Cypher/What did Dark Souls teach you?/@comment-16047389-20150223174556

Most people have already brought up the virtue of patience, so instead I'll go with something not yet mentioned.

Dark Souls taught me about the cruelty of reality. Weird thing to learn from a video game, right? But through the story and progression through Dark Souls, you learn just how dark and depressing reality can actually be.

Through one's travels throughout Lordran, we are constantly confronted with undead, monsters, and creatures that generally just want to kill you. Most of them do so for no other reason than it being in their nature, or because they no longer have the will to hold on to their sanity. During it all, we're constantly rewarded for doing terrible things, like killing innocent merchants, Lifedraining priests and clerics for that extra bit of Humanity, and murdering fire keepers simply so we can reinforce our estus flasks further. There is no longer any stable government or society in either Lordran or Drangleic, so any form of justice has to come through an individuals own actions and their perceptions of self-righteousness.

And at the end of it all, when you face the final boss and make your final world-altering decision, there is no certainty that you have in any way made things better. In some cases, your actions may have made things worse. I think my favorite symbolism of this in Dark Souls, is when you go to Anor Londo, meet Gwynevere, the only person who seems to treat you like a hero who has come to answer the call of destiny and is willing to help you in any way, and she turns out to be an illusion used to hide the fact that the land you've come to save has already been abandoned by the gods that once ruled it. You're not some hero from a far off land come to save the world from the brink, you're just a stranger in a strange land who had the misfortune of being swept up in something far greater than yourself.

I'm not saying that reality is inherently cruel, but a lot of video games, movies, and other mediums of storytelling are often caught up in the idea that there always has to be a happy ending, or a deus ex machna to fix any situation, or even a silverlining to it all. But in the real world, there isn't always a bright side to things, or even a conclusion to wrap things up in a nice bow without any loose ends or unanswered questions. Dark Souls reminds us why tragedy is tragic, and that despite how much time, effort, or care someone puts into overcoming adversity, reality isn't always kind. But in the end, that's what makes resolution all the more miraculous when it actually does happen.