MAX MCGEE'S PROFILE

UPDATE:

Level: 106
Vigor: 32
Attunement: 10
Endurance: 31
Vitality: 45
Strength: 52
Dexterity: 18
Intelligence: 9
Faith: 10
Luck: 8

Primary: Weapons: Black Knight Sword +5 (Max'd), Arbalest +7, Heavy Battle Axe +10 (Max'd)
Primary Shields: Lothric Knight Greatshield +6, Greatshield of Glory +4
Armor: Gundyr's set plus Cathedral Knight helm.
Rings: Prisoner's Chain, Estus Ring, Knight's Ring, Flame Stoneplate Ring
Equip Load: 94.1%

Embers: 5 left in the whole game except for very unreliable NPC drops. I've brought the shrine hag all the ashes there are to find and I've bought and used all the embers what come out.

As a general rule, I feel the same way about musicals as a class of media that the Westboro Baptist Church is convinced God feels about homosexuals.

I am the kind of person that would commit a genocide against musicals if they were something that could feasibly be genocided. If I had access to a genie a year ago I would have used up 33.333% of my wishes to wish them out of the world. You get my point, I think.

I hate musicals. I hate the idea of musicals. I am spiritually invested in hating the shit out of EVERY MUSICAL EVER MADE.

I was able to enjoy the Book of Mormon which I was lucky enough to see on Broadway during the original cast run, but only through the mental gymnastics of convincing myself that it was a some kind of an ANTI-MUSICAL and a giant TAKE-THAT at musicals in general (and in hindsight, I have to admit that as much as it takes the piss out of Mormonism and Africa and religion and belief and political correctness in general, structurally, it is a pretty straight forward musical).

Right now--having never even seen it, only heard it, on repeat, an increasingly embarrassing number of times--I am about as obsessed with the MUSICAL (technically...rap opera?) Hamilton as I have ever been obsessed with any piece of media I have ever consumed. I am totally rapt with its brilliance and its beauty, on so many levels, across so many dimensions.

Can it just be that good that my vendetta against musicals is somehow broken? What the hell (restricted to this particular context) is wrong with me?

Discuss!

I love the Souls series. To me, they are some of the best videogames {Kanye} of all time {/Kanye}. I love for their challenge. I love them for their brutal difficulty. I love them for their incredible atmosphere and for their make-the-player-work-for-it approach to storytelling and worldbuilding. I love them for the fist pumping, chest beating rush of triumph I feel when I scream "YEAH, MOTHERFUCKER!" at the top of my lungs (scaring the shit out of my girlfriend and my dog: my cat doesn't give a fuck) upon actually beating one of their absurdly cheap bosses, a euphoric adrenaline rushing in my brain.

I self identify as "masocore". (A word I only learned on RMN five years ago from kumada, FWIW.)

The reason I was able to beat Demon's Souls, in hindsight, is probably because it allowed you to farm arbitrarily large numbers of healing items in some late-middlegame areas. They fixed this problem in the spiritual sequel, Dark Souls with Estus Flasks. (For whatever reason, Bloodborne did nothing for me.)

I never beat Dark Souls. After picking it up and putting it down and picking it up and putting it down and picking it up and putting it down I managed, somehow, somehow, somehow, to FINALLY beat Ornstein and Smough. This still feels like one of the greatest achievements of my life. Note that I did not say one of the greatest GAMING achievements of my life. I own a company that lets me make my living making games. I somehow tricked a girl that is actually attractive into staying with me for ten years. I survived a small-bowel resection surgery under general anesthesia and went on to tell about it. I count defeating Ornstein and Smough among these achievements.

But beyond Ornstein and Smough was the bullshit crystal caverns and the double bullshit boss fight with Seath the Scaleless and you know what, Seath? I'm fucking done. Eat a dick. I'm out.

I never beat Dark Souls II. My momentum was good, my morale was good, most of the bosses were little more than speedbumps. Then I got to what I thought was the end of the game, and upon getting an idea of how much of the game was left after I defeated the Mirror Knight (in less than 10 tries, I think) I just kind of collapsed from exhaustion.

I am stuck on the final, final, really for real final boss of Dark Souls III.

I have been stuck on him since late May. I say I've been stuck since June, that doesn't mean I've actively been trying and failing that entire time. That would be the definition of insanity. No, I think in late May and early June I was still pretty chuffed over having finally, finally, finally, finally, finally, FINALLY beaten Prince Lothric, which only took 109 tries (twice as many tries as Aldrych, which in turn took twice as many tries as Pontiff Sulyvahn) and which I genuinely thought was the final boss of the game...until I found out about the next boss. The true final boss.

The Soul of Cinder.

In early June, I tried to beat the Soul of Cinder and lost as often as I could find free time to lose to him. By late June, I was limiting myself to three tries a day to avoid becoming frustrated. In July, I think I might only have taken five cracks at him total, for the whole month. I haven't played Dark Souls III once during the entire month of August, and I am strongly considering putting disc away in the case, and putting the case away on my shelf, and just accepting that I am a 30 year old man and that I will die without ever having beaten a game in the Dark Souls.

Is that okay? Because for whatever fucking reason, it doesn't FEEL okay.
I would almost rather go to the dentist and say "three root canals please, no sedation" than pick up that controller and throw my brain and eye-hand coordination and my PS4 controller at that unbeatable fucking boss (which hundreds of people have beaten and some of the smug bastards have probably done it on a challenge build or on a speedrun or something) one more fucking time. Yet there is a part of me that feels like if I were to shelve the game and give up on the momentum that has gotten me this far I would never be able to respect myself for the rest of my life, knowing that I had come that far, been that close, to beating Dark Souls IIIwhen the Soul of Cinder had broken my spirit, and I had fled into the night, and obscurity.

There are really three types of responses I'm looking for here:

• Telling me that it is okay to accept I will never beat the last boss of a videogame about imaginary knights and bonfires and make-believe dragons and demons without permanently losing a measure of my self respect.
• Telling me that I'm being a giant pansy and it's time to "GIT GUD" and get back in there and fight the Soul of Cinder until my PS4 breaks or my sanity breaks or I fucking beat him.
• Any actual tangible advice for actually BEATING the motherfucker (I can tell you my build if any of you are crazy enough/determined enough to have made it anywhere near this far in the game, or even worse, if any of you crazy mofos have actually beaten him)

First post in quite a while,
- Max

P.S. I've actually had this happen to me twice before in my life: getting stuck on the VERY LAST BOSS of a videogame and being unable to beat it. It happened to me with Parasite Eve and it happened to me with Final Fantasy IX, neither of which, to the best of my recollection, I ever beat. Even now, a decade and a half later, I still have the savegames, frozen on the precipice of victory, but never to see those end credits. I never got as philosophical about it either them. I was a teenager back then. And now, I am old.

I feel like Dark Souls 3 is much easier than DS1 or DS2, though. Is that just me?

(I never beat Dark Souls or Dark Souls 2. With Dark Souls, I managed to beat Ornstein & Smough, somehow, but my will to continue was ground to dust by Seath the Scaleless. With Dark Souls 2 I think that my will to continue petered out after beating the Mirror Knight and finding out that I wasn't actually anywhere near the end of the game, apparently. In Dark Souls 3, I genuinely feel like I am going to beat the game without hitting a wall. I just beat the Deacons of the Deep, though, so it might be I just haven't encountered the boss or bosses that is going to break my will yet. But in general so far it has seemed markedly easier than one or two.)

women we do get in high-tech who are raised in the US are often fatally compromised with victimology psychosis before they ever reach the work place

fatally compromised...like they have "victimology psychosis" (whatever the fuck that is) so bad they die from it??