Dark Souls could be getting a Netflix anime, which might confuse some. FromSoftware’s games tell purposefully ambiguous stories through several layers of untrustworthy narrators. If you don’t engage with anything beyond dialogue, you’ll get the sense that a fire is dying and it’s up to you whether it continues to burn, but it’s never clear what that means for the world. The real meat for most are the boss fights and challenges of each new area. Yet despite its narrative opacity, there is plenty for a Dark Souls anime to pull from.
The obvious choice is to flip back the pages of Dark Souls’ story and unravel the discovery of the First Flame. When it was first found in a vast cavern of unending darkness, Gwyn and his lords ascended from lowly husks to lofty gods with the power to rival their dragon overlords, unleashing an ocean of lightning across the sky. We could see the many failed attempts to replicate the First Flame, ushering in the age of demons, the betrayal of Seath the Scaleless, turning on his own kind, and the exile of Gwyn’s son, the Nameless King. It’s a fantasy epic waiting to be told, but it runs the risk of feeling generic once the curtain of mystery is lifted.
Instead of telling a linear story of the series’ nebulous history, the anime should build an anthology around the enigmatic item descriptions it is known for, narrated by a chuckling British man who hates life. Some hide the best short stories across the trilogy, others are vague enough to give writers the room to tell completely original tales with new characters, places, and lore we’ve never seen expanded on before.
Dark Souls 2’s Sea Bow describes “sea-faring marine warriors” who would hunt monsters in a great sea north of Drangleic, just below a continent “home to things inhuman”. We don’t know much about these monsters, who the marines were, or what the continent even is. Imagine if the anime was a newfound window into these myriad possibilities, a way for Dark Souls not to rely on stories that have already been told, but to suggest new ones from little more than single sentences tucked away in menus only half of players ever bothered to read.
Dark Souls’ Lloyd’s Talisman describes the Allfather’s Cleric Knights hunting the undead “in the outside world”, which is less a melting pot of lore and more a brilliant one-sentence pitch for an episode. A civilisation collapses as its people gradually lose their wits, dying over and over again, only for their gods to send hunters to pillage and massacre them. It’s a brutal tale of the callousness of those in power, painting a much better picture of Gwyn and his lords than any deep dive into their origins ever could. It remains ambiguous in how these events might factor into the overall narrative and world-building, but remain dense enough to keep us enthralled.
There’s also the iconic Xanthous King with his giant yellow headwear. His name is Jeremiah and he was exiled to the Painted World, but beyond that, we know little. Xanthous is actually a reference to his outfit being bright yellow, so we don’t even know what he is king of. The community theorises that he rules Oolacile or even that it’s a delusion spurred on by an enormous parasite. An anthology episode about this ‘king’s’ exile and how they found themselves in the Painted World, held in the giant hall of Anor Londo, could finally give meaning to his garish costume beyond its Demon’s Souls influences.
There are thousands of stories within Dark Souls beyond the grand lore of its origins or the Chosen Undead’s quest to slaughter everyone and everything on their path. Shirking these in favour of another in a long line of Game of Thrones clones would pile up a mountain of missed opportunities—do we really need to see Gwyn rallying the people of his burgeoning empire to fight an army of dragons? I’d much rather see the story of the nameless blacksmith deity whose death gave rise to the Titanite Demons, or the Banishment Sorcerers who flooded New Londo to seal away the Darkwraiths.