Dark Souls 3 has big crabs and I don’t know why. I’m not angry about it or anything. It’s just that the President of From Software and director of the original Dark Souls once asked an artist to depict a dragon with “... the deep sorrow of a magnificent beast doomed to a slow and possibly endless descent into ruin.”

And in Dark Souls 3, we’ve arrived at, ‘Make the crabs, but also make them large.” In a series lauded for attention to detail, and which tells its stories almost purely through world and character design, why are there so many big-ass crabs running around?

The ecology of Dark Souls crabs 

The Crucifixion Woods are a gaseous rotting swamp quietly portraying a story of spiritual practice gone straight up heretical. Hence all the dead folks and crucifixes and mangled lycanthropes nailed to them. In the heart of the swamp, a shallow pool covers the center third of the area. Great Crabs patrol the water, doing that nasty thing they do with their wack mouths, which comes off as the crab equivalent of licking one’s lips. Have I mentioned that I think crabs are gross?

Crabs are gross.

An otherwise innocuous cameo, the Great Crabs’ appearance in the Crucifixion Woods works for me. It’s a classic vignette: the ruins of knowledge and civilization consumed by natural forces. Oh damn, we’re all going to die, and it’s the trees’ fault. Check out all these dead folks and turned over buildings, and the crabs are big now, which is irregular. Over time, they probably grew to fill out all the free space and defend themselves from angry werewolf men. Nature is a persistent crab, scuttling sideways like a low budget Exorcist cosplay and pooping wherever the heck it wants.

But further into Dark Souls 3, From Software shakes up the crab meta. Beneath the Catacombs, the Smouldering Lake hides another civilization lost to time and excess. The chaos flame is fading, and so the demons it created are fading with it. For those unfamiliar with the lore, it’s a big magic candle someone powerful lit a long time ago that accidentally made hell. Now crabs live there. In a pressure cooker underworld. Crabs.

Despite all of time and space converging and colliding, a ballista shooting arrows the length of a minivan, the presence of an aggressive Dune-worthy magma worm, and the above average temperatures produced by lava and demon magic, Great Crabs can be found roaming the magma plain hungry and dull and gross as ever. How they maintain their chill, I have no idea.

I figured they wouldn’t show up again, but in the Ashes of Ariandel DLC, an icy wasteland pocket universe the ‘forlorn’ call home, what else wanders the icy plain at the bottom of a crevasse but some Great Crabs? It’s unlikely that crabs can be forlorn since they’re always roaming in packs, so I prefer to imagine them wandering through a cryptic interdimensional portal by pure chance. Just walking sideways through a magical scrap of painting into a rotting ice world. Normal everyday crab stuff.

Gif source: GamingWithSwift

Imagine Miyazaki, fingers steepled and head bowed in deep thought: “Make the crabs, and make them large again, yes, but this time,’ he pauses, looking up. His eyes widen, ‘This time, make them cold.’

Crabs in other games 

We’ve been cracking crabs open in games for decades now. In Skyrim, Mudcrabs pose a decent threat early on, territorial and coordinated as they are. In Metal Slug 3 we mowed down hundreds of huge crustaceans, and in Everquest 2 a supersized crab pinched players to death regularly. The archetype was cemented during Sony’s 2006 E3 press conference when a presenter showing off Genji 2 pointed out that the key to defeating a giant crab enemy was to “attack its weak point for massive damage” with overbearing press conference sincerity. Crabs and weak points go well together.

As ridiculous as it sounds on a stage in front of a live audience, crabs really do make great videogame enemies. Their thick carapace functions as a shield without the need for silly magic logic, and it implies you’ll need to take them down through pure attrition or by finding a chink in their armor. Their two huge claws are intimidating—no one wants to be pinched—easy to track, and can be destroyed independently without killing the crab outright. Great for boss stages.

Crabs are also quick, capable of moving in erratic and unfamiliar patterns, which bolsters the potential for a surprising move set. And of course, they’re monstrous. Eight legs, eyeballs on stalks, grimy algae coated shells—nature did the concept art for us. Do we need to see the mouth video again? I’ll do it.

But Dark Souls 3’s crabs don’t evolve the archetype or comment on it in a significant way. Their inclusion in the game feels like an in-joke. Check out this dumb videogame enemy in Dark Souls, a series people swear isn’t dumb.

Using the crab cliche as a playful jab in the ribs of fascinated lore hunters as a gesture that means 'not everything needs explanation, nerds' would be endearing, especially three games in. But the ice crab appearance in Ashes of Ariandel is so blindingly hamfisted that it irreversibly inflates the joke from elbow jab to kick in the pants status. We all had that friend that quoted Austin Powers just a few too many times a day. Dark Souls 3 is that friend, but crabs.

A more likely answer is that From Software is stretched too thin on their near yearly Souls schedule and couldn’t afford the time to create more enemies or invest millions in crab lore development. Miyazaki must have a Crab Origins notebook somewhere.

Without much recourse or energy to puzzle out the crab infestation myself, I turned to the Dark Souls lore experts, who all have better things to do.

Investigating the lore 

Who better to ask than VaatiVidya, arguably one of the best Dark Souls YouTubers whose Prepare to Cry series delves into individual character stories with scholarly precision and pseudo-ASMR voicework.

VaatiVidya could not be reached for immediate comment, though I’m certain Prepare to Crab is in the early outline process and that this work will no doubt serve as the foundation for any further lore theories coming from Vaati’s direction.

Famed Dark Souls streamer and Let’s Player EpicNameBro did reply to my initial tweet, confirming that he agrees there is an abundance of crabs and that the amount of water and overbearing wetness might be a clue.

However, when asked to elaborate that if, indeed, the excess of crabs in Dark Souls 3 is "like a day at the beach, I mean, c'mon," EpicNameBro did not reply. From Software must be paying these guys to keep their mandibles shut.

Dark Souls wikis didn’t reveal much either. They note the crabs’ locations, their hit points, their weaknesses, and make the same reference to “massive damage” I eventually will, but there’s no theories as to why they crop up all over. The Dark Souls 3 subreddit is as mystified as I am, though they used their collaborative power to at least put out a bonkers theory (and some good jokes).

IAmKickSix’s theory draws a connection between where the player runs into crabs with where they meet the powerful characters who found the Souls of Lords within the first flame before the original Dark Souls, which led to the creation of man.

I’m reminded of the first Japanese folktale that came up when I googled “crab japanese folktale.” In The Crab and the Monkey, a monkey makes a trade with the crab for a persimmon seed. The monkey plants a tree, promising to share the bounty when fruit eventually grows. Instead, the monkey chills in the tree and eats all the fruit and the crab dies of emotional trauma, but not before giving birth to a vengeful litter of baby crabs. I won’t spoil the ending.

It’s possible to draw parallels between the monkey as man draining the world of its resources, or persimmons, despite the potential for balance. Got to keep lighting that fire guys, right? And the crab, a stand-in for Dark Souls’ demigods, falls due to this imbalance, but not before giving birth to an army of baby crabs that swear revenge? What I’m saying is that some angry old gods gave birth to crabs and they’re pissed off. Such is the life of a lore hunter.

Crabs may not fill out the Dark Souls lore, and it’s a tough truth to swallow, but perhaps it’s about what the crab represents, not what it literally is.

Crabs: astrological doombringers? 

In astrology, Cancer is a crab sign that commonly represents water. Yeah, it’s where crabs live. More interesting though, is that according to historian Farrin Chwalkowski, Cancer was considered a “dark sign” in ancient times because it was typically hard to make out in the night sky. In the Dark Souls mythos, the Darksign represents an accursed undead, the player.

Near the end of Dark Souls 3, a Darksign appears in the sky signifying the fire fading, the convergence of all of space and time. In that sense, crabs are a symbol for the undead curse, the promise that eventually humanity will fade and a new era will begin, the promise that we’re all going to die someday. And as we only just found out, the Darksign also represents The Ringed City from the final DLC, an ancient civilization toward which all the timelines are converging. I suspect a crab cameo. Maybe a final boss? It’s totally possible.

In Greek mythology, Hercules killed a giant crab during his fight with the hydra, one of the more intimidating creatures in the original Dark Souls. Hera sent the crab as a distraction, it pinched Hercules’ foot, and he crushed it without much issue. Here, the crab represents the helpful sidekick, the proto-henchman, and for such an underdog to go from a weak side character to one of the biggest, most dangerous creatures in Dark Souls 3 is one hell of a reversal.

Crab conclusion 

In tandem with the Darksign association, From Software is attempting to evoke an apocalypse event in an implicit, nearly subconscious way by pulling from popular mythologies. The natural order has been flipped, the end is nigh, check out these huge crustaceans.  

It fails. They’re crabs.

But I do appreciate propping up something as mundane as a fancy dinner people pull from the abyss on the daily. Despite Dark Souls 3’s annoying fondness for the big suckers, their lack of contribution to our precious lore beyond serving as an apocalyptic symbol, and their failure to evolve the crab videogame archetype at all, crabs deserve a chance to crack our shells for awhile.

Illusorywall is a prominent figure in the Dark Souls community, primarily for testing "obscure and debated mechanics" and "cut content or other oddities" on their endlessly fascinating blog. Seriously, I've never been so transfixed by floating doors and out-of-bounds exploration.

But Illusorywall is also the human embodiment of a bonfire, organizing mass community events. This time, the pitch is a return to Dark Souls 2, an attempt to repopulate the servers with enough players to give the impression of launch populations. There's no real catch or qualification for joining in. Just pop onto whatever version of Dark Souls 2 you own (though Scholar of the First Sin is encouraged) between February 25 and March 11 and use the multiplayer functionality as much as possible. Illusorywall's announcement tweet lists a few pointers to send folks in the right direction for easy access to PvP and co-op options, and encourages plenty of message ratings too.

It's about time, I say. With Dark Souls 3 nearly a year in the rearview and coming to a close with its final DLC in March, what better time to revisit the most divisive game in the series? Personally, I'm looking forward to giving it another go to invigorate my personal ranking of the Dark Souls series with some healthy context. And I haven't played through Scholar of the First Sin yet. Who's with me?

Before we start: the following is perhaps best avoided if you want to go into Dark Souls 3's second and final portion of DLC completely fresh. I will say that I've watched the following four minute long "gameplay montage" and while it does showcase new locations, monsters and bosses, I—as someone who is very much looking forward to the series' supposed parting shot—don't feel it gives too much away in isolation.

But I understand if you'd rather leave now. Happy to read on? Great. 

Incase that wasn't clear, it's spoiler territory from hereon.  

You might've spotted the following footage in James' hands-on preview of Dark Souls 3's Ringed City DLC yesterday, however the game's publisher Bandai Namco has since released it on its official YouTube channel. I won't read James' hands-on till I've played the DLC myself, however when I asked him for a spoiler-free account of his short time with it he pondered whether it'll be the send off the series deserves, but that it is "a weird final act for sure."

The following in-game footage offers a glimpse at a few of the locales scattered around the "literal end of the world" setting, as well as a few typically bastard hard-looking enemies, and that demon boss fight that featured in last month's reveal trailer. Around the one minute mark, there's even a sort-of stealth set piece which is pretty unusual against the how these games tend to operate.

I'm cautious to over-analyse that, simply because I want to get my hands on the Ringed City DLC right now. It's due on March 28, however here's a gathering of the series' best and worst enemies to tide you over.  

Dark Souls 3: The Ringed City is meant to be a long, exhaustive descent. It's the journey upriver in Apocalypse Now, the tumble through chaos in Paradise Lost, the descent in, uh, The Descent. The looming sense that you’re approaching a terrible truth and the impression of a long distance traveled are central to The Ringed City, where you quite literally fall deeper and deeper into an abyss, punching through layers of history before reaching the titular Ringed City at the bottom—and as a bizarre first for the series, fall damage is turned off to compensate.

After Ashes of Ariandel, a fun but all too familiar detour through A Videogame Snow Level™, The Ringed City has a lot to prove. As the final DLC release for Dark Souls 3, it needs to be stranger and more creative than ever. And as the capstone to the Dark Souls series as a whole, it needs to put as neat a bow as possible on a widely beloved series. While I only got to play the DLC’s opening minutes at an event put on by Bandai-Namco, The Ringed City feels much more surprising and original than Ashes of Ariandel, but also proves that it’s finally time to give the series some much deserved rest.

Sugar, we’re going down 

The Ringed City opens up on a confusing mess of upturned buildings and jagged grey terrain, where civilizations from all of time and space are converging on a single point far below the surface—what I imagine as a kind of fourth dimensional toilet flush. I start on the rim of the twisted scene. A pilgrim sits near the edge, looking down, muttering on about the abyss and a beast and Prince Lorian. It’s hitting all the Dark Souls lore notes: darkness, royalty, and monsters.

The only way I can go is down, so I slide and drop to an outcropping below. I make my way across a bridge towards the shelled remains of a keep, but before I can make it to safety, around half-a-dozen purple portals open up right on the other side. Crippled knights crawl out of them and towards me, skinny and glistening and probably pissed off. It’s hard to make out whether they’re undead or comprised entirely of skeletal armor.

They’re not difficult to take out on the bridge, which feels like a chokepoint designed to (somewhat) safely introduce me to these new enemies. But because it’s Dark Souls, I’m also harassed by a few upright spellcaster variations of the same enemy type tossing evil magic missiles my way. I get too distracted and the crawlies quickly dogpile, pulling me back down into the purple portals they arrived in. Let’s try again.

Another go and I clean up the area, taking in my surroundings. Nothing but upturned medieval architecture and terrain in a catastrophic crawl towards the massive hole below. The Ringed City is somewhere down there. I head up some stairs to look for items, and a towering, rotund humanoid encased in roots (maybe dry guts) with a swirling black void for a head jumps down in front of me.

It wields a scimitar as tall as my knight, which I figure must be slow to swing, even for a big guy. That’s not the case—hell, this dude can jump twice his height in the air and come down swinging. He’s quick, but has clear tells and limited stamina, a nice break from the exhausting, perpetually-swinging Mirkwood Knights in the Ashes of Ariandel DLC. With a bit of patience, I poke the guy enough to take him out and carry on.

Further on, an item hangs precariously on a narrow ledge jutting out over a sheer drop. From Software knows I want the shiny, and as soon as I grab it, the ground crumbles beneath me and I fall hundreds of feet through the stained glass window of a toppled library below. I hit the ground hard, but my health doesn’t move an inch. Gravity and pain work differently here. 

Before I can get my bearings, a few crawlies pop out of their portals, flanked by casters again, but this time I’m in the center of the mess and have to watch my back. Still, it’s not a significant challenge. The little guys are easy to stunlock and the casters aren’t a problem if I listen to the sound cues and roll at the right time.

But then one bubbles up and lurches toward me, expanding into a large humanity phantom in midair. Cue the frantic scribbling of lore fanatics. I roll out of the way at the last second and the phantom hits the ground, disappearing in a ghastly explosion. I pray to whatever god still exists in Dark Souls’ world that it only gets weirder from here.

Angelfire

And it does, even if I don’t have the time to progress much further. In a callback to Bloodborne’s machine gun sequence in Old Yharnam, I run into an angelic butterfly creature outside the cathedral as it rains down rapidfire light rays on some abyssal monsters. Once they’re gone, it spots me, and sends the same rays my way, killing me in a few dumbfounded seconds. Dead and ashamed, I pass the controller to my colleague Lucas at GamesRadar who learns from my mistakes and books it when he reaches the butterfly, darting between cover whenever it stops to recharge. 

Soon enough, he finds a rooted humanoid creature somehow connected to the butterfly hiding behind a boulder. Killing it makes the butterfly dissolve (for now).

In our remaining time, Lucas dives around a room with infinitely respawning crawlies guarding some items and dies to one of those big void-headed scimitar men from earlier accompanied by some suicidal crawlies (they take Lucas to school, as the kids say). We both watch one player make it further into a vast caldera where the butterfly makes another appearance, along with pools of poisonous sludge, curse-weapon wielding hollow slaves, and more of the big scimitar void-heads, angry as ever. 

There’s still no boss in sight, and if The Ringed City is truly bigger in every way than Ashes of Ariandel—more bosses, more weapons, more areas, and more everything, as I’m told by the Bandai Namco rep on hand—then this descent might be a long one. ‘More’ sounds great, but I just hope it’s a fitting journey down.

The Ringed City is a perfect opportunity to wrap the series up in whatever way From Software sees fit. The descent through actual layers of the Dark Souls timeline—settings and creatures previously seen and unseen—means the team has a final shot to do whatever the hell they want. So far, The Ringed City is showing promising signs. By turning off such important systems like fall damage, designing levels around long vertical drops, and featuring eerie abyssal enemies that can attack in hordes without warning, it feels like From Software is revisiting their own design bible and skipping every fifth rule.

Note: The video above contains some new footage from The Ringed City, but it also contains spoilers. Watch at your own risk!

As long as the trend continues and similarly drastic changes show up throughout The Ringed City, I’m in. If gravity doesn't kill you, then what else behaves differently in the converging crater? Is time linear? Space? Will up always be up and down, down? Will the enemies and characters all assume a solid form, or will we be fighting properly messed up monsters? Can we trust our eyes? In the opening moments of Dark Souls 3, an abyssal snake bursts from an undead, but the rest of the game doesn’t do much else with viscous otherworldly body horror. Maybe The Ringed City is where the culmination of From Software's wildest ideas are waiting for us.

But even if the level design isn’t some magical evolution and enemies test the same tactics with a new void-centric wardrobe and the mythology is just made more confusing than whole, I’m OK with Dark Souls feeling like plain old Dark Souls one last time.

We'll have our final verdict on The Ringed City when it releases on March 28. 

According to Fact Mag, a collection of ambient and deep house music from Dark Souls sound designer Yuji Takenouchi will be reissued in a compilation this March.  

Titled Brand New Day, the compilation collects three EPs recorded under the name Mr. YT, each released between 1997 and 1998: Brand New Day, Southern Paradise, and Parfum.

While the Dark Souls connection is indirect, it's easy to hear Takenouchi's appreciation for subtlety. Take a listen for yourself in the sampler below. None of the tracks would blow out your speakers, but the combination of deep bass, hypnotic samples, and steady rhythms make it nearly impossible not to move.

Brand New Day will be available March 10, but if the sampler helped you make up your mind, it's available for preorder here.