 Hey everybody, it's summer down here in the south, which means working outdoors for a living wears you out so badly you cannot move when you get home from work. And of course, almost no games released in the summer, which means there's not that much new to talk about. My last two videos were about Elden Ring, and after finishing my third time through the game I decided to go back and replay every Soulslight game I have to try and see where I ranked Elden Ring in the genre, and I am so damn dedicated to bringing you my signature brand of bitching about games that I made this video. The top 10 Soulslikes, except 3 extra because it's going to be top 13. Now this is only legit Soulslikes. No games like Hollow Knight or Dead Cells or Doom Eternal or any of the dozens of games that people call Soulslikes that aren't actually Soulslikes at all. Let's hop to it. Number 13. Dark Souls 2. You know what's funny? The Dark Souls 2 starts with the player character laying down on his face. Because you know, this game kind of falls on its face a lot. Listen, I've played Dark Souls 2 for hundreds of hours, probably like 10 times through. And in all of those hours I still can't figure out why I actually like it so much. It's just loaded with flaws. Movement is horrendous, so bad. The bosses are just putridly easy, enemies are just titanically annoying. Scholar of the First Sin literally spams you with NPC invaders, which are basically the worst things in the series. And one of the biggest issues for me is that it has easily the worst animations in the series. Right from Demon's Souls on, the series has been amazingly animated. Look at how perfect the animation is here. Now look at how stiff and unconvincing it is in Dark Souls 2. It's crazy that DS2 is motion capture because everything looks much less real. Also the ridiculous manual aiming with certain weapons is just so terrible. I'm aware of some people like it for PvP, but Souls PvP is shit, so that's not a reasonable trade off for me. Still, even though it can't go even one level without revealing one terrible flaw or another, it's still a game worth playing. It's a big game and it buries you in so many souls that you can basically level up every stat, which is kind of fun, and it has some good levels and it's always at least engaging. It's basically only ahead of a few other games in the genre, but it is definitely better than those games than like, you know, Immortal Unchained or Code Vein or Ashen. So there's that. Number 12, Salt and Sanctuary. I realize I cannot finish Salt and Sacrifice because Dark Souls 2, mixed with Monster Hunter, is something I don't enjoy at all. But that doesn't take away from how amazingly great the first game was. Salt and Sanctuary is the best of the 2D Souls likes. Some people seem to prefer Blasphemous, but I find that game needlessly punishing with platforming that's just kind of cancer. Salt and Sanctuary is a very faithful recreation of Dark Souls 1 in Metroidvania form. Everything is here, from equip load affecting your role, to armor that doesn't do shit, to combat that revolves around stamina management more than anything else. It's a shockingly big game too. Lots of the best Souls-like games have something almost intangible about how the game feels. That's almost like a secret sauce. The recently released sequel is a great example of a game that's basically the same thing, but has lost that secret sauce. These games rely on getting their balance and world just right. Salt and Sanctuary made the right design choices almost everywhere that isn't its poison swamps. An amazing game. The skill trees is a travesty of eye cancer, but you know, nothing's perfect. Number 11. Remnant from the Ashes Okay, this is the one game I've chosen that is maybe on the border of a true Souls-like. First of all, it has guns, so you know, there's that. But it has an estus flask, combat that relies on dodge spam, bonfires, hard bosses, upgradable loot, fashion souls armor. I call this a Souls-like, you can fight me if you disagree. Remnant is one of the best games of the last few years. It's definitely got double A production values, but it's pretty tightly designed, and while the story is pointless, the combat is excellent. I didn't love the whole random campaign generation that makes it so you have to play through like three times without seeing every boss, but I can't blame them for trying to figure out a way to provide extra value. Their games last two titles were both very good. Darksiders 3 was a much better game than it got credit for, and Remnant is amazing. Easily one of the best Souls-likes ever made, and a game I sincerely hope they are making a sequel to right now. Alright, let's get into the controversial Top 10 ranking. This is objective fact, by the way, not my opinion, so if you disagree, you know, you're like wrong. Number 10. NEO NEO is one of those games that can be very frustrating if you fail to fully commit to the mechanics. When I first started it, I felt like I was constantly stamina starved. Then when I got the hang of the key pulse, it became playable. But it wasn't until I started mastering the flux and double flux key pulse that the game really clicked. NEO gives you almost unlimited stamina, and balances this by having every other enemy be able to one hit kill you while having infinite poise. And it works. This game isn't perfect by a long shot. I hate the loot system, but that is totally subjective. Some people love this shit, but holy crap, I find it so annoying to have to do inventory management for 10 minutes every 2 missions, and the level design itself is pretty mediocre. And many of the side missions are pretty bland, but the combat is so good. It makes up for 3 hours of deconstructing useless gear and the occasional bullshit of counter. Amazing game. Just amazing. Number 9. I've seen some people online try to argue that Lord of the Fallen was actually not a bad game. Those people are wrong. Lord of the Fallen is ass. The surge, on the other hand, is excellent. It has an awful lot of flaws, like how the late game enemies literally cannot be staggered with most weapons and never stop attacking. And I despise, despise the timer on your dropped souls. And the maps can be extremely confusing at first. But the surge gets the atmosphere right. The entire game feels like a real place, and it has a really great story with perfect voice acting. The limb severing mechanic is awesome, and even today it is a very beautiful game with textures and armor being very impressive. Also the implant progression system is absolutely brilliant. If you played it once before and kinda bounced off it because it was stupidly punishing at first, I would suggest you give it another go. I've played it 4 or 5 times, and I love it more every time. As a souls player it can feel kinda clunky and limiting at first, but when you realize the game is almost entirely about positioning and being very deliberate about your attacks, it starts to click. And when you finally find and equip enough implants to feel like you're creating a build, it starts to really sing. Yes, there is a grotesque amount of 1 or 2 hit kills in the surge, but once you really get the hang of keeping your distance and picking your moments, it shows itself to be a wonderfully designed game. And one of the best sci-fi stories in a video game in years. Top notch shit man. Number 8. Neo 2 Okay, Neo 2 is Neo, but a little bit better in every way. Not a ton better, but a little bit better. It does basically nothing differently at all. The levels are the same, the enemies are the same. It focuses more on a kind of parry system, but it's basically the same game. It's better because it looks better, and it plays a bit better. And the level design is a little bit better. The story is garbage still, but who cares. So yeah, Neo 1, but a little tiny bit better. A great great game. Number 7. The Surge 2 So Neo 2 ranks above Neo 1 because it's the same game, but a tiny bit better. The Surge 2 is a whole different thing. The Surge 2 is not the Surge, but a little better. It's a fundamentally different game. The Surge 1 is like Demon Souls, or Dark Souls. The Surge 2 is Bloodborne, where the first game is about careful positioning and being very deliberate about your attacks. The Surge 2 is about being extremely aggressive at all times. I think it is vastly superior in the gameplay department, while being much inferior in the story and world building department. It still has the DS1 style interconnected world that the Surge 1 has. In fact, it's even better because there are less loading screens between areas. But it's also not nearly as believable and emotionally powerful as the Surge 1 somehow manages to be. The voice acting is much worse, and the characters are almost totally forgettable. Hell, you go from Warren, who is an actual character in the Surge 1, to playing as voiceless protagonist dude. That's kind of emblematic of the whole story issue. Still, the levels themselves feel much more carefully designed for gameplay, and the streamline progression and upgrade system is basically perfect. Most important, the gameplay is just fucking smooth as hell. I seriously considered putting this higher, but the games above it are so universally excellent I couldn't really justify it. Still, the Surge 2 is comfortably the best souls-like game developed by a company other than FromSoft. I absolutely love it. The DLC isn't as good as the first game, but it just feels great to play, and to me how a game feels is the most important thing. Number 6, Demon's Souls. A bunch of people will argue that Demons is the best game in the genre, and I can understand why people say that, and there are real arguments in favor of Demons being number one. It has some of the most memorable levels in the series, and it started the whole thing. It's also a very slow game, with pretty limited combat, and while it features some amazing bosses, most of them ended up being refined into better versions of themselves later on. Still, the atmosphere and pacing are amazing, and even right from the start, the combat system was pretty great. Number 5, Dark Souls 1. Where the original Demon's Souls is looking pretty dated now, Dark Souls 1 is still pretty good, totally playable. The sound and level design combined to make the entire journey feel lonely and sad, in a way no other game in the series has quite matched. Almost every boss is either great, or memorable, or both. Even the bad bosses are bad in an infuriatingly memorable way, and no other game has done the interconnected world of Dark Souls so well. Almost every single person who played Dark Souls will remember the feeling they had when they stepped off an elevator and realized that they had worked their way all the way back around to fire the enshrine again. I mean everyone probably has that, that says something. And replaying Dark Souls 1 made me realize how impressively balanced it is. Even though it is a much, much slower game than the rest of the series, it's still pretty damn challenging because every encounter feels almost perfectly balanced to keep you challenged without being frustrated. Dark Souls could easily be number one, because its design is so careful and considered. The only thing holding it back from the top of the list is the technology and budget. No matter how great the game is, it's true that Lost Izalith is pretty garbage, and it's true that Bed of Chaos is pretty terrible. And while it's still an extremely smooth gameplay feel, it's not as smooth as the other games ahead of it. Every FromSoft game is amazing, and everyone could be considered the best. This is all personal preference, of course. But FromSoft has gotten disgustingly good at making smooth-ass action games, and it's hard to rank a game that has Bed of Chaos ahead of the other games on this list. Number four, Elden Ring. The world seems convinced that Elden Ring is From's best game. I disagree, I just disagree. I played it three and a half times. I went back and played all the other games just to make sure I wasn't being crazy and I am still convinced that it simply is not. Elden Ring is a great game. I've never tried to say it wasn't. It's gameplay and game feel is insanely smooth. Animations are off the chart amazing. Both the player, but especially the enemies and bosses are some of the best animations you will ever see in an action game. Its best levels are as good as anything else they've done, and the sheer amount of spells, weapons, weapon arts, spirit summons, armor sets is insane. It's very likely the best open world game ever made. But therein lies the very thing that keeps it being number four on this list. The open world format leads to a bunch of stuff that is the very antithesis of why I love FromSoft games. Because the game is open world, it suffers from all the issues that open world games suffer from. A bunch of time wandering around. A bunch of time walking or riding a horse. Pacing issues where the game goes from straight amazing to dreadful and a ton of reuse that eventually does start to pile up. I enjoyed fighting many of the bosses twice, but there are a shitload of bosses that appear much, much more than twice. And there's the sheer amount of bosses and enemies who have infinite stamina, which turns the combat into waiting 30 minutes to get one hit in before being hit with an instant follow up or having to dodge nine times to get one more swipe in before dodging nine more times. Or bosses where almost every fucking attack is an AOE. Then there's the story that I find just incomprehensible and muddled. It's pointlessly opaque with quests that require you to have a fucking notebook to remember where you met someone. Almost everything I love about the games is hurt by the open world, not helped. In fact, it's weird to me that most people can't admit that the very best parts of the game are the things that are not in the open world. The legacy dungeons like Stormvale, Volcano Manor, the Academy, Llandale, the underground areas like Seafra, the larger areas like Karrion Manor or Castle Soul or Redman Castle. That's what souls does best. And those are easily the best parts of Elden Ring. In fact, several of them are the very best levels in this series. Llandale Castle is probably the best thing they've ever done. Now, the twenty second copy pasted mine or catacombs is fine because souls combat is good and the game just feels great. But the game is good in spite of all that fucking chaff, not because of it. Is the game really better because you fought the God's Game Bosses five times or the Magra Worm six times, the Demi-Human, whatever, four times, the Dragon Consul for three times. Is it better because you fought the Ulcerated Tree Spirit seriously like ten times? At least, I don't think it is. And because the game is so damn big and a ton of its greatness is based upon the joy of the first time you explore, it's simply not as replayable as the games that are ahead of it. The games higher on this list can be played a million times because it's not the size and exploration that makes them great. It's the careful meticulous design that is everywhere. Now, Elden Ring is still a fantastic game because FromSoft has become the very best action game developer around with an art and animation team that is straight up the best in the world. But it's not the best game in the genre because it's simply not nearly as good as the top three games they've ever made. Number three, Bloodborne. When Bloodborne releases on PC or PS5, it will very likely shoot to number one on this list. But the frame rate is so bad. It's kind of painful for my eyes. Even at the time, the frame rate really hurt the game. But after years of only playing their games at 60 FPS or better, it is very, very hard to go back to Bloodborne. If you don't play anything else while you're in the middle of a run, you will eventually adjust to it, but it never feels great. And God forbid you go play Elden Ring or Dark Souls 3 and then come back in the middle, your eyes will bleed, dude. When you add in really bad load times, even after the patch and the highly, highly annoying decision to make, you have to sit through two 20 second loading screens every single time you want to level up or buy something or upgrade your weapons. You have a major strike against the game. But Bloodborne is good enough to overcome the mandatory Hunter Dream leveling or eye cancer frame rate. Like Elden Ring, it's doles out its story stingily through cryptic NPCs and world building. But because it's not open world, the game can carefully pace those NPC interactions and it can carefully pace how you move through the world so that the mystery will very slowly but consistently reveal itself to you over time. The game world is large enough to feel like a real journey, but small enough to never feel like you're losing track of what the hell is supposed to be going on. If Build Variety or PvP is what you look for in a Souls like, then you're probably going to have Bloodborne lower on your list. But that doesn't matter all that much to me. I like leveling and progression, but I rarely care about having a massive variety of builds because even when I replay the games, I only use a few different weapons, which is why Bloodborne works so well despite having less weapons and build variety than the Souls games. It's not perfect, of course. Bosses like Dark Beast Paul are annoying for me because I hate bosses where I can't see what the fuck they're doing. And bosses like Paul that are just a huge mess of hair and arms and legs that you stand under, those are frustrating. And the Chalice Dungeons, where you have half health and fight amygdala in a closet of one-hit kills, is horrendous. And of course, there's a few mandatory terrible NPC fights. And the DLC has one of the stupidest parts of the series where you fight two of the worst enemies in the series in a tiny cave. But overall, Bloodborne is one of the best games ever made. It is bullshit that Sony refuses to give the game a PS5 patch for free. In fact, it's grotesque because it's clear the only reason they aren't is because they plan on selling you that unlocked frame rate for 70 bucks, which is a scam, but they could at least release the scam so the game can finally be played the way it was meant to be played. Number two, Dark Souls 3. When Dark Souls 3 first came out, a bunch of reviews knocked it because it felt too much like Dark Souls, which I didn't understand and I understand even less today. Dark Souls 3 is a significantly different game from the first three Souls games. I mean, I guess it still takes place in a Dark Souls type of world. But like, yeah, it's called Dark Souls 3. Dark Souls 3 is in fact a nearly perfect fucking game. It is a bigger game than you might recall as well. While it's still a very linear game, it feels very much like you're on a journey through a real world. Every level is exceptionally detailed and carefully designed. And while it still has a few bullshit boss attacks like Osiris's terrible charge attack and some wonky hitboxes, it has way less of those things than any of the previous titles. And yeah, there are a few annoying enemies like the Jailers and the big chain-throwing dudes at Archdragon Peak. But it also has some of the series' very best bosses. Gale, Nameless King, Pontiff, Twin Princes, Twin Dragons, Champion Gun Deer, Abyss Watchers, Madeer, Frida. These are all almost perfectly designed bosses. Bosses like Gale and Frida managed to be challenging without being overly frustrating. And even after you know the fights so well that they don't kill you unless you get careless and stupid, they are so damn satisfying that they stay fun. I will never, ever not enjoy fighting Gale. I will always enjoy fighting Nameless King. These are memorable fights and every level has the depressing vibe and sound design that makes a Souls game feel like a journey through a dying world. Most importantly, it does an amazing job of balancing speed and enemy design so that the game remains challenging without being needlessly frustrating. And the NPC fights are generally less toxic than the other games. I love Dark Souls 3. It is one of my very favorite games ever in the top three or four. It is the perfect blend of old and new. It's fast without resorting to bosses that don't give you a chance to hit them. Frida is the closest thing to an Elden Ring boss in Dark Souls 3, except even she has pretty long recovering times after her stupidly long attack chains. And you can parry her and get a repost because her attack speed isn't insane and she staggers pretty consistently. So it doesn't feel like you're playing Russian Roulette hitting her a second time. Also, Frida has the best mid-fight cutscene in the history of the series. So there's that, too. Dark Souls 3 is one of the very finest games ever made and the second best game that FromSoft has ever made. Number one, Sekiro. I'm curious to see in the comments how many people think this is crazy. I think it's crazy because the first time I played Sekiro, I thought it was not as good as the Souls games or Bloodborne. The game frustrated me and the lack of weapon options or armor made the progression feel a little less impactful. It wasn't till the second playthrough when the game fully clicked. It took half of my first playthrough to stop instinctually trying to dodge everything. And even after that, I found myself constantly trying to wait until the very last second to parry. Then in my second playthrough, I discovered just how forgiving the deflect timing actually is. And from that moment on, I fell hell over heels in love with Sekiro. The combat in Sekiro is amazing. And basically every single damn boss is fantastic. Eshin Sword Saint is, in my opinion, one of the best bosses ever in video game history. Ganeichiro and Owlfather are right up there, too. Even the Divine Dragon is probably their best gimmick boss ever. When you look at Bed of Chaos and then evolve it to Divine Dragon, it is quite a leap. When you add an actually good story and a world and level design that is perfectly paced, you have a game that is almost entirely perfect. The level design is amazing. The movement system is fantastic. The stealth is actually pretty fun. The progression is great, even if the skill point system falls a bit short. In fact, the only major complaint I have is that losing XP on death doesn't really work in Sekiro because it too heavily incentivizes farming because you lose so much XP on dying with no chance to get it back. You end up finding yourself farming up the XP to lock in the next skill point. And because I fucking loathe boring farming in any game, that is a major strike against Sekiro. But the posture and deflect system allows Sekiro's enemies and bosses to attack constantly like they do in Elden Ring, but without annoyingly having to dodge eight times to hit them. If Malinia was in Sekiro, she would be one of the greatest bosses of all time. In Sekiro, each difficult battle becomes a dance because even when you're playing defense, you are playing offense. Isshin is so damn satisfying because you hit him twice and he hits you twice and you go back and hit him again and you're right in each other's faces the whole time. Once you learn Isshin, he becomes unbelievably satisfying to beat without taking damage. Almost every boss in the game is like that. They're very, very hard the first time, but each subsequent attempt, you get better at it until you are finally destroying the bosses and they can't even touch you. Sekiro demands you be pretty close to perfect, not in your reaction times, but in knowing how you're supposed to respond to each attack. And it has easily the very best story in the series by a mile because it doesn't get away with having the little pieces of its story fucking smeared over the whole thing and item descriptions. It tells its story clearly with solid pacing, interesting theme and interesting characters. Sekiro has the best story, the best combat, the best movement system. It's levels and world are as good as anything else in the series, aside from Elden Ring. It is infinitely replayable because it is relatively short and wickedly fucking good. Sekiro is the best souls like ever, which makes it one of, if not the best game ever. Nothing really comes all that close to me, frankly. Oh, and you can refight all the bosses too, which should be in all the fucking games. All right, that's my totally objective factual, scientifically proven list of the best souls likes ever. If you disagree, you are wrong, of course, but I will be interested in seeing how you were wrong when you comment. Thanks for coming, y'all. I'm 99% sure my next video is about Destiny 2's last few months and how I think power level just needs to fucking go away. All right, I'll see you next time. Bye.