Dark Souls 3’s Japanese launch trailer brings ridiculous new bosses, story hints, and a skeleton army

Oh Japan. Why do you always get the best video game promo material? You get the best box art. You get normal, non-badass Kirby. And now it seems you get better Dark Souls trailers as well. Where we in the west recently took delivery of a rather generic montage reel, overlaid with a barnstormingly inappropriate cover version of True Colors, Japan’s Dark Souls 3 launch trailer is quite the thing.

How much of the thing? Enough to have me peering ever closer to my screen throughout, commentating with nothing more than an incisive and well-considered barrage of “What?”, “No!”, and “WHAT!?”.

We get new, doom-laden story dialogue. We get visions of new environments. We get an amazing set-piece involving a rampaging skeleton army and a rickety, Indiana Jones-style rope bridge.

We get duels with the unmistakable flavour of Bloodborne’s Frenzied Hunter battles. And we get a look at a host of new bosses, which easily equal the imagination and grandeur the series’ major showdowns have become synonymous with. Of particular note is the stand-off against a spell-caster riding the neck of a giant chicken-dragon. Also, there’s a giant enemy crab, who should finally claw back respect for his kind, a full decade after the shame of Sony’s 2006 E3 press conference.

I apologise for the ‘claw back’ pun. It was honestly an accident, but then I decided to leave it in. And for that I’m sorry.