Dark Souls on a Plane: Krupa's Behind-the-Scenes Blog (Patreon)

Dark Souls on a Plane: Krupa's Behind-the-Scenes Blog

On June 15, 2019, aboard Virgin Atlantic flight VS8 in LA, we set out with a simple goal: beat Dark Souls before we landed in London.

Spoiler: we did it.

You probably already know that, having seen the video. But we wanted to write a little blog about the experience.

The entire challenge was filmed on the flight back from this year’s E3. There was no formal shot plan and nothing was faked. I mean, what’s the point otherwise? So everything you see was shot on our phones and all the footage was captured on the plane. We used the Switch’s in-built capture feature which records the last 30 seconds of gameplay, which meant we had to constantly remember to hit that button whenever we did something important we might want to show. We got most stuff, but the excitement of beating Iron Golem on his second-ever attempt was too much for Gav.

Flight Finchy getting sleepy.

Of course, it’s possible to beat Dark Souls in 32 minutes but – and this may come as a surprise to you, especially if you’ve watched a lot of our videos – we’re not World-Class speedrunners and we didn’t want to use glitches. (We also don’t know how to do the glitches.) While he’s endured days-worth of watching it, Gav’s probably only had a grand total of four hours of Dark Souls under his belt going in. I can complete the game on a good run in around 8 or so hours, but that’s with everything going right. That’s without us getting stuck on anything. That’s without handing over the game to someone who I’ve seen take 40 goes to kill Gwyn or to someone else who’s never run Sen’s solo. 

Whatever happened, I knew it’d be close. So we had to have a plan.

We Needed a Plan

In the week’s running up to E3, I started doing some runs to find out roughly how long it’d take me to finish the game and figure out ways to make life easy for ourselves – best weapon for everyone playing? Route with the least backtracking? Which NPCs to kill, which to spare?

Moments before taking off. The plan is ready-to-go.

I also wanted to figure out a way to know if we were ahead of or behind schedule. So I broke down the 9 hour flight into ‘splits’ into which I allocated areas and bosses. But also items that we’d need to pick up in those areas to minimise time spent back-tracking until we had the Lord Vessel. Basically, I wanted us to bank as much time as possible before we got to Anor Londo, Ornstein & Smough, and the endgame.

Some key things to do early on to save us later included...

• Buy smithing gear. (So we didn’t have to go back to André unnecessarily.)
• Kill Lautrec for the FAP ring.
• Havel’s ring.
• Large Ember. (Take our weapon +5 asap.)
• Pick up all freely available titanite shards. (So we could spend consumable souls on levels not all on buying titanite for merchants.)

Build and Equipment

The idea for the build was simple: get OP as soon as possible. 

A lot of souls went straight into Strength, with some also going into Vitality and Endurance. I knew we’d get the Ring of Favour and Protection soon enough which would help us out a lot. (I was extremely paranoid someone was going to take it off accidentally and we’d be screwed later on.)

I wanted to turn Finchy into an all-purpose battering ram, so he’d be well-equipped to take on any of the late-game bosses regardless of their resistances. A good build no matter which one of us was playing. I also decided early that we’d go full Zweihander. It’s in the graveyard right from the beginning and has such a useful moveset that’s easy to master. I also did some sequence-breaking before we went to Anor Londo to get the Very Large Ember from New Londo, so we could jack-it-up quicker.

Also, I knew when in doubt, we wouldn’t be above Havelling It, either. It was a core part of the strategy when we first played Dark Souls together and it still serves us well now.

Finchy’s final build and equipment.

The Final Stats

Here’s a look at the final plan with all the details filled in.

The Plan. Done.

We eventually killed Gwyn ironically just over Killeagh, on the South coast of Ireland, with about 46 minutes to go. It could’ve been closer. We joked about waiting till we were over Britain, but didn’t want to risk it. 

So we killed Gwyn and linked the fire as we approached Wales. 

We even stayed on the plane after everyone got off so we could take this picture together. We explained to the Virgin flight attendant what we’d been doing. I think she sort of understood it. Maybe she was just really polite.

Heathrow. Saturday, 15 June 2019.

We’re so proud of this video. We spent several weeks working on it after E3, making it as good as we knew it could be. But that’s only possible because of you reading this. Without the support of our patrons, we wouldn’t have the resources or time – the best resource – to make things of this quality. We’re excited to make more one-off or limited-run video series alongside Retry. Thank you for making it all possible.

Krupa x

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P.S. Now, here’s a little secret. The original plan was to film this on the way out to E3, 10 days earlier. But the game threw up this glitch we’d never encountered before. The interaction prompt wouldn’t reliably appear – meaning you couldn’t immediately pick up items, open doors, or light bonfires. A nightmare if you’re running through areas. We changed Switches, changed Joycons, but the problem persisted. Weirdly though after a couple of hours, the bug disappeared, but by then we’d given up on the run as we’d wasted so much time trying to figure out what was wrong.

Attempt #1: Here’s Gav ready to go, 10 days earlier.

Turns out the same thing happened on the way back, but we just ploughed through praying it’d go away. 

It did.

And you now know all about the rest.