A Fireside Chat About Conquering Dark Souls With CaptaineToinon

Difficulty has the been the subject of many debates since Dark Souls reached mainstream popularity. Demon’s Souls was an underground hit, bolstered by reviews and other media around its release. By the time Dark Souls spread out, it became one of the most recognizable franchises of the last decade. The game is notorious for crushing players, not because it’s unbearably hard, but because it is designed to make the player pay attention to everything. The way an enemy moves, what sort of attacks it has at its disposal, level layouts and clever enemy placement, all of it is meticulously crafted to ensure the player takes their time.

Yet, with any game there is someone wanting to play it as quickly as possible. Speedruns are typically impressive, but anytime it’s mastery of a game that’s already known for its challenge, it makes the run that much more intriguing to watch. Naturally, we looked for some of the best runners of the game around to see what type of person would want to go through this challenge.

Sitting at the top of the speedrun leaderboards off and on for Dark Souls Any % is a young man named Antoine “CaptaineToinon” Sutter. Sutter’s story of his Dark Souls speedrun almost didn’t happen as he had been playing a ton of Call of Duty 4 at the time and only got into Dark Souls due to friends constantly recommending the series. We chatted about Sutter’s life and becoming a master a game that has put many in tears in an interview over Twitter.

Antoine Sutter is a 22-year-old from Geneva Switzerland, who is currently in college studying Computer Science and gaming in his free time. “The first console I owned was a Playstation 2 that I received for Christmas 2002,” he explained when asked about what started his love of games. “Although I have great memories from the games I've played on it (FIFA 2002, the Rachet & Clank games, or Need for Speed Most Wanted to name just a few), my parents sold most of the games a few years later. I started playing more frequently in 2007 after I managed to convince my parents to buy an Xbox 360 with Call of Duty 4 (Yes, I was one of those annoying kids online) and Guitar Hero. From there, I was playing more and more as I was getting older and started playing a larger variety when I got my first PC and other consoles.”

It wasn’t until a friend brought up Dark Souls that Sutter even noticed. “My first time playing Dark Souls is actually a pretty funny story. A friend that I was playing Call of Duty a lot with started talking about Dark Souls and how I should give it a try (back in 2013). I didn't want to blindly buy the game, so I ended up playing a pirated version on my PC.”

“I specifically remember not being able to get past the Taurus Demon (the 2nd boss of the game) and uninstalling it quietly out of frustration and just telling my friend in the process ‘Yeah, those types of games are not for me.’ If only I knew.”

While Sutter was turned off from the game’s challenges, he eventually came back to it, again because of that one friend.

“When Dark Souls II released in 2014, my friend still insisted that I should give it a fair chance. Because you tend to give up on games way more quickly when you pirate them, this time I blindly bought Dark Souls II full price on Xbox 360 at release. Oh boy, those first few hours were one of the best gaming experiences I've ever had. I fell in love with the franchise and started playing through all of them, but over time the first Dark Souls was one I was sticking with the most.”

This love of the series eventually met a stonewall. After playing every inch of a game, especially one mostly driven by a single-player design, what comes next? Sutter’s interest was eventually rekindled after seeing a run of Dark Souls on a French speedrunning show.

“The show was called "SpeedGame" that at the time was airing on the biggest video game French website, Jeux Video. I ended up giving it a try in December 2015, because despite really liking the game, I didn't really know what to do on it anymore, so I thought speedrunning could add an interesting replay value. I also decided to start streaming at the same time, because I wanted to improve my English. I've been exclusively running Dark Souls since then and I'm not planning to stop.”

With the first Dark Souls getting the remaster treatment, it’s interesting to see how a runner might approach a remake. Sutter didn’t seem like he would start running that version. “I think I'll enjoy it casually and I'm also keeping an eye on the Switch version. However, most if not all of the interesting glitches present in the original game will most likely be removed from the Remaster. This could make for an easier and more RNG heavy speedrun.” RNG being a common term that stands for Random Number Generation, but is used mostly be runners to describe an element that is not fixed.

“Also, despite the fact that I've been running DS1 for a little bit over 3 years now, I still have a lot to improve and a lot of categories that I want to run again. I’ll just stick to the original.”

For the life of a student, the future looks to hold more school and more gaming. Sutter still has a way to go. “I still have year and a half left before finishing my degree in computer science and that's before I can even attend a university, so I'm still in there for a while. As for my online life, speedrunning and streaming have been very fun and successful for me in the past few months so I'll focus a lot on that.”

For those looking to be floored by expert level play, check out Sutter’s Twitch channel.