Since the very beginning of the Souls genre, FromSoftware has implemented multiple endings in each game to keep things fresh and encourage multiple playthroughs. The only problem is, a lot of the time, those endings can be pretty difficult to achieve.
This list defines difficulty by how easy requirements are to miss for a particular ending, the amount of work required, and any other difficulties that emerge along the way. Sometimes that comes in the form of an NPC questline that’s easy to mess up, or sometimes it’s excelling at the game like never before.
Demon’s Soulsis well known as being the first in the long line of venerable Souls games that FromSoftware created, and it’s often considered to be one of the most difficult with very unforgiving checkpoints and limited health items. It alsointroduces several iconic weapons to the series.
However, getting the most difficult ending, the Good Ending, isn’t as taxing as in the games that followed. All the player needs to do is beat the game as normal, and then at the very end, the player needs to walk away from the Maiden In Black and reject the power of The Old One. That triggers the good ending. It’s a good thing it isn’t dependent on world tendency, or this would be a whole lot harder.
ThoughDark Soulsisn’t the first game in the FromSoftware lineup of Souls games, it is the game that popularized the subgenre to unforeseen heights that continue to this day. Like its predecessor, Demon’s Souls, it also has two main endings, and the Age Of Dark ending is still fairly easy to achieve.
To achieve the Age of Dark ending, players simply need to walk away from the flame after defeating Gwyn. However, if the player wants a little more context for what they’ve just done, they will need to defeat the Four Kings boss fight before placing the Lordvessel to talk to Darkstalker Kaathe, who will help illuminate just what this ending means for the world.
Dark Souls 2is something of a black sheep in the FromSoftware catalog, but it still has a contingent of die-hard fans who love it for everything that it tries to change or innovate on, including its endings.
LikeDemon’s Souls,Dark Souls 2has two endings (so long as the player is on a newer patch or has the Scholar of the First Sin DLC). After defeating Nashandra, then defeating Aldia, Scholar of the First Sin, players must simply walk away from the throne they have sought the entire game and head out into the world to try and find a new way to break the franchise’s undead curse.
Elden Ringis a massive game with a record amount of possible endings, each having vastly different requirements. Though most have a questline attached, none is more complicated or involved as the Age Of Stars ending.
For this ending, players need to follow Ranni’s questline to completion, stretching all the way across The Lands Between, fighting horrific monsters like Astel, and slaying a set of Two Fingers to become the consort to Ranni. It is a long process with many steps, sometimes requiring a guide to see through to the end and also involving making it throughmany more of the game’s plentiful bosses.
Bloodborneis considered to be the FromSoftware game that meaningfully iterated on the Souls formula and brought home the potential of the entire subgenre as a whole through its aggressive gameplay androgues gallery of fearsome bosses. It also innovated on endings, offering two main endings, and a secret third ending, Childhood’s Beginning.
To get this ending, players need to consume three versions of the One Third of Umbilical Cord item in a single run. These cords are spread throughout the game, sometimes as items, sometimes as rewards for quests, and it’s never signaled to the player that this is a possibility to pursue. Luckily there are more than three umbilical cords in the game, but not many more, so players need to plan carefully which items to find and consume before the end of the game.
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, is a pioneering game in many ways, but perhaps none moreso than the incredible and dynamic combat system that fully discarded the sometimes sluggish combat of previous Soulslike games. However,Sekiro’s final and fourth ending, return, is very fiddly to get and requires a lot of workbeyond beating the game’s incredible bosses.
In short, this ending involves going through the game, refusing to become Shura, and following the long questline of The Divine Child, found after the Folding Screen Monkeys, who required the Fresh Serpent Viscera and Dried Serpent Viscera among many other items to complete. It’s a long and involved process, eventually resulting in Frozen Tears, which can be offered to Kuro at the very end of the game.
Dark Souls 3had the unenviable task of capping off one of the most influential trilogies in gaming history. For some, it does it well, for others, the game remains something of a disappointment. Regardless, its endings are infamous for being very fiddly and easy to miss if not rigorously following a guide throughout.
The worst for this is the Usurpation of Fire ending. This involves finding Yoel of Londor (missable), using his free level up five times (missable), finding Anri at Halfway Fortress (missable), then finding Anri in the Catacombs (missable), making sure that Horace does not kill Anri by choosing the wrong dialogue options, then finding Yuria and exhausting her dialogue after Pontiff Sulyvahn, then performing the wedding. Each of these steps is easy to miss and become locked out if the player goes too far in the game, making it an exercise in frustration if a player isn’t following a guide carefully.
