It might seem strange to frame it this way, but the act of modifying your favourite game is tantamount to admitting it could’ve been just a bit better: that maybe the developers should have taken a turkey baster to the gloopy Blood Soldiers of Un-Garth, that the instant-kill spike trap right before the save point was perhaps just a too punitive. It’s ironic it takes an ardent superfan to recognise the true flaws in a work, no matter how great – it’s only by fully internalising where the brilliant design shines through that you can recognise the dusty corners that could use a bit more illumination. Of course, mods can never truly complete even the most flawed games, at least if we hold the creator’s original vision as the blueprint – the modder’s own voice adds to the experience, editing and compensating and harmonising in a way that might be more pleasant than the original, but irrevocably changing the nature of the performance in the process.
It should be no surprise, then, that Scott “Grimrukh” Mooney’s Daughters of Ash project for the PC version of Dark Souls gives us one of the all-time great examples of this dichotomy. The Souls games aren’t exactly known for their mirth – what with the shattered world full of wandering eidolons and all – but there’s a vein of deeply weird humour that hums underneath the windswept cliff-faces and desolate settlements. While this usually manifests itself in the cackles of depraved merchants and the ragdoll-like flailing of the series’ memetic yet indomitable skeletons, perhaps the most-misunderstood example is Pinwheel, the sorcerous boss of the Catacombs.
Most agree Pinwheel is laughably easy to defeat compared to the series’ gallery of fearsome foes, casting easy-to-avoid spells and floating aimlessly in place while the Chosen Undead hacks at its bulbous hide. You don’t have to scroll very far on any Souls forum to find some well-meaning player referring to this particular part of the game as disappointing or badly designed. What many players don’t realise is there’s fairly strong evidence Pinwheel was intended to be a joke boss fight from the very start. According to multiple fan sources, the boss’s Japanese name refers to a comedy act where two people share an oversized coat in order to engage in some clumsy antics, similar to the Whose Line Is It Anyway? skit Helping Hands. Viewed from this vantage, since Pinwheel is little more than three bodies Frankensteined together, the punchline seems to be he’s far too uncoordinated to put up much of a fight beyond cloning himself endlessly.
Dark Souls: Pinwheel Boss Fight (4K 60fps) Watch on YouTube
In Daughters of Ash, however, the player becomes the victim of the jape. After you deliver the smackdown to Pinwheel the first time, he staggers back to life with no less than a dozen phantoms, all of whom blast you with devastating beams. He sends in the clones almost as fast as you can kill them with a slow, sweeping weapon like the Zweihander, and when you finally manage to land a blow, he teleports out of your grasp. When I tell Mooney I struggled more with this augmented mega-Pinwheel than the majority of his new bosses, including several built from the ground up around content developer From Software cut from the game, such as the Darkwraith general known as Ja-Yearl, he can’t help but meditate on the tension between creator and modder himself. “Yeah, I mean, Pinwheel was probably too easy to begin with, even for a joke boss, and now he’s probably too hard,” he says, laughing. “That was one of the few ‘do you get this?’ moments I put in there. I wanted the mod to be playable to someone who hadn’t actually finished the game, but I also recognised 99.9 per cent of people playing it had already beaten Dark Souls multiple times. So it was definitely a balancing act.”
Dark Souls Daughters of Ash – Let’s Play Part 14: Pinwheels Watch on YouTube
Arguably the first mega-mod for one of the most beloved games of its generation, Daughters is an unfathomably ambitious work, which makes it all the more surprising to discover it’s Mooney’s first mod project. An Aussie now residing in the US, Mooney’s background is in maths, but he picked up programming skills as part of his day job. While it took a few tries for him to truly immerse himself in the cult of Souls fandom – quitting in his early attempts to ring the two bells – he now calls them his favourite games of all time. He knew early on he wanted to play around with Miyazaki’s toys, but, as he explains, no-one really had the tools for such an endeavour until recently.