 Dark Souls 3, as you would guess, is the third installment in the Dark Souls franchise. This one's character creator takes more points from the first Dark Souls rather than the second, which could be considered an entirely different character creator compared to how similar one and three are. I don't really have a point with these info dump intros, I just feel as though I need to say something before I start talking about points. Anyway, your starting options are gender, you can be male or female, age, interestingly stuff, which changes your characters all around skin complexion and body type ever so slightly. You get a starting class, which is not exactly a class in the traditional RPG sense, but rather a set of starting stats. There is nothing that one class can do that others couldn't do with just a few level ups, but this does allow you to customize kind of how you start the game off and how you play it. You also get a choice of a handful of burial gifts, as you do with every Souls game. Degrees are very minorly influential consumables that you start with, it's just another minor thing to change your starting experience with each playthrough. Down here you can see that we have several face presets of varying degrees, all with a short lore description that gives you a little bit of insight into the world. You also get physical build options, which I'm gonna go ahead and say is a huge plus. I'll go into detail later when I talk about what's good about this character creator, but for now, very nice that that's a feature. And by selecting the appearance button, we can go into further detail with additional adjustment sliders, not just for the head and face, but for the body as well. You also have a similar face button that uses the character's current settings as a basis for making tons of similar faces with very slight varying adjustments. And to top it all off, you also have the option to save or load any design options that you've made, just in case if you want to use any of your own presets instead of the ones that the game gives you, or if you accidentally stumble upon a design that you really like and you want to be able to use it for another save file in the future. So the bad. I'm sure a lot of people are sick of hearing me complain about menus by now, but navigating this thing with a mouse and keyboard is a nightmare. First of all, the game does not show you PC button prompts, only on the controller. This means that the menu takes a little bit of getting used to and finicking around to figure out what the hotkeys are. For example, I didn't know what the buttons for confirm and back are. I just had to mess around with the keys until I figured out what it was. I didn't know that the F key is to switch the view on the character. I had to press every button to figure out what that was. It would be nice if they put little button prompts at the bottom if you were using keyboard and mouse. This means the menus take some getting used to, which every graphic designer knows should never be the case. A good menu means you can get used to it in a second. A great menu means you never have to, because you instantly understand it. And learning that in order to make major adjustments by tens instead of ones by holding down shift and pressing the arrow keys together is not something you would instantly understand without a button prompt, which is absent. Even with going back and forth, if you don't know what the hotkeys are, which I certainly didn't, you have to right click and then pick the option that you want. You can't even rotate the character by clicking and dragging, no, you have to press these individual buttons down here. You either have to click the arrows at the end or press the arrow keys on your keyboard. Just let me click and drag the little icon, it's right there. Overall, just figuring out how to use this menu and just the act of using it with a mouse and keyboard is frustrating. Yes, I know, you could use a controller, but you have to understand that not everyone can, nor does everyone want to. And that's not even mentioning the fact that this character creator also suffers from the hovering over selection instantly selects it, making comparisons difficult syndrome. But the menus are rough to use. Next up, the options are liars, and will oftentimes affect multiple parts of a character at once, not just what they say. For example, for nose size, pushing the slider closer to the wide part will enlarge the eyes, lengthen the nose, and lower the height of the mouth. That is way more than just nose size. And pushing it towards the narrow section will widen the jaw, shorten the nose, and shrink the eyes, and raise the mouth. What? This mouth occlusion also affects the chin depth. This nostril slant actually affects the nose tip, and nostril size widens the mouth. And does nasal size change the mouth to look greener? This makes it really finicky and way more time consuming than it should be to make the perfect face for your character, because when adjusting these sliders you never know if they're going to make a change that's so subtle that you have to mess with three other sliders to notice it, or something so wild and face changing that it will completely destroy your carefully crafted ashen horn. I could go more into how messy just the act of customizing your character is in Dark Souls 3's character creator, but you get the idea. And finally, a minor negative that's one of two parts. The first part will be in the bad, the second part will be in the good. I personally don't think this character creator looks very good. Just looking at the presets, they all look pretty derpy and kinda gross, especially the hair. I said in the Monster Hunter video that I am a stickler for hair and character creators. And this… this hurts me. This is pretty bad. You get 24 options and they all look… eugh. Same with the facial hair, it looks really messy and in need of a trim or some kind of combing. That is the grossest beard I've ever seen. Now I know someone out there is going to make the excuse that it's meant to be that way, and that the world of Dark Souls is supposed to be a depressing and dreary place, and that a pretty character would mess up with the tone of that fantasy. And I disagree for two reasons. First of all, because you can make a pretty character given enough time, and also because you can make a monstrosity like this. And I don't know about you, and although this is pretty terrifying, I don't think this really keeps in the tone of the game either. Say what you want about, oh, they're meant to be ugly. I don't know that this is what you really mean by that. Okay, so now let's go into the good. I feel as though those that have played this game already know what some of the positives are. Now I mentioned before that you can change your character's size in this game. You can be skinny, or fat, or anything in between. And not just that. You can pick and choose in what ways your character is skinny or fat. If you want a huge lower body, but a small upper body, you can. If you want tiny legs and thick arms, you can. A couple of people on the Monster Hunter video mentioned problems with being able to change your body size, needing new animations, or to adjust equipment to fit the character, to which I present Dark Souls. The equipment scales with your body type. Look at that. Animations, weapons, telegraphs, hitboxes, equipment, gameplay, all unaffected by the character's size. This is awesome. Now I said it is difficult to make a nice looking character, but I didn't say it was impossible. You just have to spend a lot of time flipping through menus. And this is a positive because you essentially have control over nearly every inch of the face. Not only finicky control, but control nonetheless. Dark Souls allows you to morph parts of the face that plenty of games would never really touch, and in ways that many games would never allow. The game gives you so much control over the character's face that it allows different parts of the face to clip through itself. They even give you RGB color sliders for the skin. And though I'd never say there's such a thing as too many options, too many of them do contradict each other. But on the other hand they can help in making very specific face types. The double-edged sword of giving the player so much control over the character's face is that you can make nearly any face you can imagine given enough time. Any face. Including monstrous ones. And I cite this as a positive because it is incredibly entertaining to traverse through this desolate wasteland with serious characters and a serious story while looking like something out of a bootleg Muppets show. This can make both the character creator and main game a whole lot more fun. Oh my god. Give me a kiss. Come here. Give me a kiss. But hey, maybe you don't want to sit through all the menus pushing all the sliders all over the place while have I got news for you. The similar face option is great for all you artists who want their own horrifying monstrosity but just want to sit back and leave things up to fate. All you got to do is select similar face and look at all these face options that you can pick. A minor nitpick about this is that if you are trying to use this option legitimately for like your pretty character or your handsome character as soon as you hit that similar face option your character's face is forever changed to one of these selections even if you hit back. And there's no undo option so that's a little bit annoying. So if you accidentally hit similar face you are stuck with one of these options. But yes the similar face feature is great and just to illustrate how great it is we're going to just randomize this poor boy's face a bunch of times and see where we end up. Ah yes there we go. Ah. Perfection. So here's my conclusion. Using the menus and trying to make a nice looking character is almost as difficult as the actual game. But it's fantastic for making horrifying freaks of nature. This has been character creator critique. Be sure to vote... Shut up bitch. This is my show now. What? How did you get here? Oh I see how it is. I come in, bless you with the greatest video series that's ever graced the internet and then once it's done you kick me to the curb. Well guess what? You milk drink and hoo-ha. You can't get rid of me that easily. You can't do this. This is my show. Get out of here. You're not welcome here anymore. I hope you've got crutches at the ready because I'm going to beat all four of your cheeks so hard your grandchildren are going to walk funny. No no no no no no no no. You come here. You thought you got rid of me? Well you were wrong. Sit down and shut up. It's time for D&D summer boiii...