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If the player dies again before reaching their bloodstain, the Souls are permanently gone.
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One chance is given for the player to recover their lost Souls in the form of a bloodstain, which is placed at or around where they last died. Upon losing all of their health points and dying, players lose their Souls and are teleported back to a bonfire where they last rested, which serves as a checkpoint.
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One of the core mechanics of the series is that it uses death to teach players how to react in hostile environments, encouraging repetition, learning from past mistakes, and prior experience as a means of overcoming its difficulty. Souls gained are usually proportional to the difficulty of fighting certain enemies the more difficult an enemy, the more souls the player will gain. The player gains souls from gameplay battles which act as both experience points to level up and as currency to buy items. Each class has its own starting equipment and abilities that can be tailored to the player's experience and choices as they progress. Players can choose between classes, including knights, barbarians, thieves, and mages. The protagonist of each Souls game can have a varying gender, appearance, name, and starting class via character creation. Players battle bosses to progress through the story, while interacting with strange non-playable characters. The Souls games are played in a third-person perspective, and focus on exploring interconnected environments while fighting enemies with weapons and magic. At the end of each game, characters may reignite the "first flame" or allow it to fade, recurring a choice others have made before, which becomes a plot point in itself. These games are linked through their setting and an overarching cyclic narrative centering around fire, and are linked to their predecessor Demon's Souls through common themes and elements, including interactions with phantoms and battles with demons. The plot of the Dark Souls trilogy differs in that it revolves around the player's attempts, through various means, to either reverse or perpetuate the spread of a curse of undeath known as the "Darksign" - which prevents true death but prompts the undead's gradual descent into a madness and decay called "Hollowing" - based on the player's decisions. Another recurring motif is that of a once powerful and prosperous kingdom which has fallen into ruin: for example the setting of Demon's Souls, Boletaria, in which the player attempts to halt the spread of a demon-infested fog that threatens to consume the world. The accretion, loss, and recovery of souls is central to the narrative and gameplay of Souls games. The games take place within a dark, medieval fantasy setting, where the player's character fights against knights, dragons, phantoms, demons, and other monstrous or supernatural entities. By 2020, the Souls series had sold over 28.7 million copies. Other FromSoftware games, including King's Field, Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Elden Ring, share several related concepts. The series has been both praised and criticized for its high level of game difficulty.
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The series' creator, Hidetaka Miyazaki, served as director for each of them with the exceptions of Dark Souls II and the externally developed Demon's Souls remake. The series began with the release of Demon's Souls for the PlayStation 3 in 2009, and was followed by Dark Souls and its sequels, Dark Souls II and Dark Souls III, in the 2010s. Souls is a series of action role-playing games developed by FromSoftware. PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5
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