Play Dark Souls III first, and specifically the Fire Fades Edition, because it is the fastest and most forgiving of the three to learn on and it is the only Dark Souls III box in the budget bracket that comes with both of its expansions. If you would rather be able to walk away from a wall than bang your head on it, buy Elden Ring instead — it is not a Dark Souls game, and we say so plainly below, but it is the door most people now come in through.
Here is the problem this page exists to solve. The numbers on the boxes look like an order and they are not one. Dark Souls, Dark Souls II and Dark Souls III share a world and a vocabulary but not a story you have to follow; nothing in the third game is spoiled by skipping the first. What the numbers do tell you is how old the design is, and that matters enormously when you are deciding which one to survive first. The 2011 game is slower, stiffer and explains nothing. The 2016 game moves like a modern action game.
So this is not a ranking of which Dark Souls is best — people have argued about that for fifteen years and will not stop for us. It is a ranking of which one to buy first with real money, judged on three things, in this order.
1. What is actually in the box. Three of these four discs include their expansions at no extra cost and one does not, and they all sit in roughly the same price bracket. That is the biggest value difference on this page and store listings are terrible at telling you about it. 2. How survivable the first five hours are. The cost of a souls game is not the money, it is the learning curve, and a game you quit in week one has the worst value-per-dollar on the site no matter what you paid. 3. Whether the game lets you leave a wall alone. Linear games point you at the boss that is beating you and wait. Open ones let you go somewhere else and come back stronger, which is the single biggest difference between finishing one of these and shelving it.
Every pick below is a PlayStation disc we confirmed as buyable with a live price before writing a word about it, and every claim about what is inside one comes from the publisher — Bandai Namco for the Fire Fades contents, PlayStation's own game pages for editions, player counts and the PS Plus requirement, PlayStation.Blog for what the Bloodborne Game of the Year box adds, the ESRB for every rating. Sources are at the foot of the page. Prices are live on the cards, never typed into this text.
How to pick your first Dark Souls
The order we would actually buy them in
First, Dark Souls III: The Fire Fades Edition. It has the quickest, most responsive combat FromSoftware had made up to that point, which means the thing you are learning — read the attack, answer it — is taught at a speed that feels like a modern game rather than a 2011 one. And Bandai Namco's own retail announcement is clear that the Fire Fades box is the base game plus Ashes of Ariandel and The Ringed City, so the expansions are already paid for.
Second, Dark Souls: Remastered. The original has the best-built world in the genre — one interconnected map that folds back on itself instead of a level list — and that is exactly why it lands better once you already speak the language. PlayStation's page states the remaster is the main game plus the Artorias of the Abyss DLC at 60fps, so this one is complete too.
Third, Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin, and third is the honest slot for it. It is the least-loved of the three and it is also the most game for the money: PlayStation describes Scholar of the First Sin as including all the Dark Souls II content released to date and more, which means the three Lost Crowns chapters are on the disc. Buy it when you want more of this, not to find out whether you like it.
Elden Ring sits at number two on the cards for a reason, and the reason is not that it is a Dark Souls game. It is the same studio, the same combat grammar and a completely different structure, and for a lot of people it is a better first purchase than any of the three above. The section below on walls explains when to pick it instead, and the full value case is in is Elden Ring worth it.
Check which box includes its expansions, because one of these does not
This is where the money is on this page. Three of the four picks are all-in editions and one is base-game-only, and they are all in the same neighborhood on price.
Includes its DLC:Dark Souls III's Fire Fades Edition (Ashes of Ariandel and The Ringed City, per Bandai Namco), Dark Souls II's Scholar of the First Sin (all content released to date, per PlayStation) and Dark Souls: Remastered (Artorias of the Abyss, per PlayStation). Base game only:Elden Ring, whose Shadow of the Erdtree expansion PlayStation lists as a separate $39.99 add-on — more than the base disc costs at the price it is at now.
None of that makes a game better or worse. It changes what you get for the number on the card, which is the only thing this site ranks. The same reasoning applied across the whole shelf is in what does definitive edition mean and best cheap game collections, and if you are wondering why a remaster so often includes the DLC while a remake never does, that is remaster vs remake.
Decide now whether you want to be able to call for help
All four picks support co-operative play and all four treat it as optional. PlayStation lists Dark Souls III, Dark Souls: Remastered and Elden Ring as 1-player games that support up to 6 online players with PS Plus, with online play optional, and says the Scholar of the First Sin edition raised Dark Souls II's sessions from 4 players to 6.
Two things follow. If summoning another player is how you intend to get past the hard parts — and it is a completely legitimate way to play these games — add the running cost of a subscription to the price on the card before you decide; is PS Plus worth it has the tiers. If you are not subscribing, nothing here is a dead box: every one of these is a complete single-player campaign with the internet unplugged, which is the quality we rank highest in best cheap single-player games.
Buy the last-gen disc, and check the upgrade before you buy the new one
Three of these four are PS4 discs that play on a PS5 with a disc drive, which is the cheapest route onto current-gen hardware there is. Elden Ring goes one better: PlayStation's page states that "Players who purchase the PlayStation®4 version can upgrade for free to the PlayStation®5 version."
Read the mechanics before you count on it. PlayStation's support page says that when you upgrade from a disc, "You need to keep the disc inserted each time to play the game"— the disc becomes a key — and that "PS4 game discs can't be used with the PlayStation®5 Digital Edition" , so a driveless console cannot use any of this. The full set of rules and limitations is in do PS4 games work on PS5, and the format argument generally is physical vs digital PS5 games.
Read the rating, because one of these is not like the others
The ESRB rates Dark Souls III and Dark Souls: Remastered Mature 17+, and Elden Ring Mature 17+ for Blood and Gore, Language, Suggestive Themes and Violence. Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin is rated Teen — the only pick here that is — which is worth knowing if you are buying for a teenager, though Blood and Gore, Mild Language, Partial Nudity and Violence are still in its descriptor list. It is not a children's game. If you are shopping for a younger player, start at cheap games for kids instead.
Is today's price the one to take?
The Dark Souls discs are not about to halve again. They have been in the back catalog for years and have found their floor; what moves them now is remaining stock, not publisher discounting, and this lane has already produced one example of a famous disc drifting back up above its launch price as the print run ended — the skip pick on best cheap soulslike games is exactly that. If a Dark Souls pick here is inside your bracket today, that is a normal time to buy it.
Elden Ring is the one still traveling. It is the newest and most expensive pick on this page and the one a seasonal sale genuinely moves, so if it is the one you want and the price is close rather than comfortable, the windows are in when do games go on sale and the game sale calendar. And if a listing looks dramatically cheaper than everything around it, read how to spot a fake game discount first — on a fifteen-year-old series, an outlier price is usually an outlier edition.
