I meant to check this before, but forgot to. You don't need to specifically use R1/L1. R2/L2 both work, and even A/B/X/Y (or the Playstation equivalents). Stranger still, stick movements can decrease the grab HP, but it's kind of weird about how it registers it. I decided to search around a bit for the origin of the rumor that escaping grabs was a glitch and found out it may trace back to a quote from EpicNameBro in this video: ruclips.net/video/uA48RCLNX2A/видео.html
Sticks are probably triggering spam protection - because they are changing their state almost instantly. I think that PC's keyboard doesn't have such an issue?
Lol, like when some people thought that the escaping from ceaseless discharge was a glitch, even though it has literally an animation to it jumping and dying
If you wait to wake him up and instead snipe the monsters (idk their actual name), he'll survive more often. Snipe all but one, not including the hiding one, and then speak with him. If he bugs and doesn't move, save and quit, reload, and he'll be down in the mud fighting.
If you're talking about the pit with 4 chaos eaters, BEFORE TALKING TO HIM snipe 3 of them to death and leave the 4th one with a bit of health. Let Siegmeyer drop down and kill. If you kill all of them before Siegmeyer drops down, he gives you a ring and the quest ends there (last step of the quest won't be available). If Siegmeyer ends with less than half health, you fail his quest. You probably already know this but I'm writing for other people to see too 👍🏻
mine was somehow atrociously godly and dealt 630 damage per swing and solo'd them pretty easily. i just watched in awe. judging by what plenty of people say he's supposed to have trouble against the chaos eaters?
@@MudkipMan97 Siegmeyers journey is the most bullshit "quest" in all of Dark Souls tbh. There's no way anyone can do it without looking things up beforehand
I love that the mimic has the audacity to continue pretending to be a chest after he surprises and half eats you but you escape. It's like it thinks "Crap, they weren't supposed to do that. Well maybe they'll think I went away and open me again..."
That's a good comment but I think it's because he has AI disabled outside of that attack, if you will, notice how they all stop attacking after they escape a grab.
@@ollie7070 I think mimics do just return to their idle state if opening them caused a grab. I vaguely recall a time where I was with a friend in his world and I went "Oooh, chest!" knowing full well it was a mimic and had it munch on me. I lived, and it remained sitting there.
There is no grab struggle animation to let the player know that mashing does anything unlike in most other games. So it does look like a bug when your character isn't doing anything then the attack ends early for seemingly no reason like the gaping dragon/centipede demon.
@@keighne7650 By struggle animation I am talking about having the character move their arms and legs when inputs are received by the game. Kinda like a QTE when you mash a button or key you can see the character resist/push with each input.
@@wowwhatacleverandoriginaln9416 Hey, I also didn't know about this. I just kinda assumed getting grabbed, especially by mimics, meant (almost-) instant death. I think there isn't a single loading screen tip telling you that you can wriggle free in any of the souls games...
Cause you ain't a programmer. Even if you were, how would you go through all this? Life is fleeting. We can never really be that knowledgeable at something as we think we are.
Lol I thought the same. My friend and I had different builds. I was a tank, he was a wizard. I would always laugh when he got grabbed cause we both assumed it was an inescapable death
@@wowwhatacleverandoriginaln9416 I knew about grab escape but I didn't know you had to do it exactly 25 times to escape all grapples. I just assumed it was harder depending on the enemy.
I know that DS isn't type type of game to flash "MASH R1 TO ESCAPE" on screen, but it would have been nice for there to be some way for the game to tell the player that this is a mechanic.
There's some really rad grab escape animations in later games. One of my favorites is against the fish women in Fishing Hamlet. They mount you and start hacking away at you with their cleaver but if you escape, you catch the blade before a final vicious face chop and struggle out from under them.
The “grab HP” sheds so much light on this grab escape seeing how some grabs (like centipede) you can escape with basically no damage taken since the grab itself with the grab HP starts so early
Grapple breaking like this is a thing in a lot of games, so many that I always instinctively mash the shoulder buttons in any game when I get grabbed. Then again I also always hold A as soon as the Pokeball passes the front of the Pokemon's sprite, so I guess I'm conditioned to believe in the unspoken magic of button holding/mashing
@@chompythebeast interesting that you were conditioned to smash the shoulder buttons. I always instinctively smash the face buttons because those are much more common in games with grapple attacks in my experience.
Yeah I was fortunate enough to have an experienced souls player tell me to mash buttons when I get grabbed when I first encountered the fleshy werewolf looking people in blight town. Without escaping the grab they would one hit kill me, if I mashed the buttons it would do a pathetic amount of damage, the difference is insane.
@@KateHikes83TJD The thing that makes DaS2's grabs so shitty is that they don't interrupt player animations, so it'll _look_ like you rolled out of it, but then you'll be snapped back to the grab once that animation has finished, making it look like you got screwed by the hitbox. In the other games the animation is just interrupted so it looks less bullshitty, though you may notice that some of those interrupted animations look pretty awkward or unnatural sometimes, especially in 1. I assume that at one point they wanted to make 2 more polished with better transition animations, but simply ran out of time
The only animation that I've seen that shows you actually writhing when you spam the buttons is in DS3 when Stray Demon grabs you. Wish they showed that more so it's more obvious you're trying to counter the grab.
@@Yorikoification Yeah, this is kind of what I mean. When you do the escape on any grab animation it is effectively an escape, but it just the same animation but shorter. The stray demon grab I mentioned actually shows you wiggle then escape, and that's what I wanted to see more of.
@@Yorikoification at the very least, you can also mash out of the giant uh... hand baby thing grabs. I vaguely recall people saying that the stray demon's grab was the only one you could escape, but that's definitely not true. ruclips.net/video/Zuny57g6olY/видео.html this video demonstrates it, damage seems to be about halved and the animation changes. I think it worked on mimics and crabs as well, iirc your player even jiggles a bit while you mash out of crab grabs. I suspect the jiggling might have also been a thing with some grabs in DS2, I definitely remember seeing it a bunch of times and I didn't play 3 nearly as much as 1 or 2.
@@HotClown yes i noticed early on in ds3 play that mashing r1 & l1 reduced the length & damage of the grabs. The lycanthrope grab is another it works on.
Well it also has some of the least used enemies too. Different teams worked on enemy designs vs level designs. Enemy design team was on point, but clearly level designers were lagging behind after they finished the Undead settlement, the Depths, Sen's Fortress, Blighttown, Forest zones, Seeth's Archives, and Kiln of the first flame.
@@roachdoggjr155 I feel like that's the biggest mystery in the souls series. Obviously Miyazaki had SOME plan for them, and I refuse to believe that they were always supposed to just crowd that lava pit the way they did. The weirdest part is that Izalith has no connection to the dragons at all so the only explanation is that either just the dragon legs or fully formed decrepit dragons all wandered up to Izalith from Ash Lake for...no reason... Like, if those dragons legs were throughout Ash Lake then that makes tons of sense, leftover cut up dragons from the war who can't die. Possibly those affected by Nito's power??? too many cool possibilities, not enough actual facts... the enemy designers did their jobs right I'm sure
@@roachdoggjr155 That's more the fault of the level designers than the enemy designers. The dragon legs were probably supposed to be a miniboss, the missing lower half of the poison dragon in Valley of the Drakes. But since they ran out of time the level designers just placed a bunch of them around Lost Izalith to make it less empty.
I feel like most people didn't know this for the fact most of these do insane damage so no amount of mashing let's you survive (mimics and the soul eaters come to mind)
More like why is the gaping dragon so cinematic? A super easy, skippable boss in a halfway area that has little to nothing to do with the story or main objectives by all rights should not be the most visually iconic boss in the game but here we are
it's absolutely amazing how much stuff has been packed into this game. Just think of all the weird, quirky systems that are at work here - how the world shifts and adjusts around you, the unique online system, vagrants, miracles being visible across worlds, many different world areas, the level design, world lore, bosses, a ton of different unique weapons with a bunch of different movesets, magic, bows, parries, staggers, environments influencing fights, status effects, and a shit ton of different animations to illustrate all of this happening. Some of these things are so well hidden not even people with +500 hours know about them. DS1 has so much in it, so many little details that were meticulously crafted for our experience, to make it really believable and immersive. Most games don't reach this level of detail even after 10 DLCs and years of additional development, and DS doesn't even bother pointing it all out - it just lets you figure it all for yourself. Truly incredible.
They really should have added a ring called the grease ring that makes each button press do 5 grab damage along with increasing fire damage done and received.
I didn't know most of those grabs existed, it's really nice to see more of a game without the risk of losing thousands of souls. (I knew about escapes from ymfah runs)
Yeah, the rolly cat grab was pretty surprising. Had no idea that was a grab. Some of these I knew they had grabs but I'd never actually been hit by it so it was still cool to see.
@@gosucab944 You absolutely aren't wrong but imagine you get attacked by a clam and then inside of the clam is a slightly smaller crab and then that murders you
I kind of learned about this mechanic by myself, naturally hitting the buttons as a reaction to being grabbed. Didn't realize, that there was a specific counter, though. And instead of clicking both attack buttons (on the mouse), I only used one, hence the death on NG+. It makes me realize, that there are different ways, through which people learn things.
How could anyone think it's a glitch when there's a custom animation for it? Two animations if you think about it. Two animations that sync up with each other.
I've wondered about that myself. I think it's probably players who only played through once or twice and didn't really see many grabs mostly just hearing about the escape mechanic rather than experiencing it much first hand.
Because this grab attacks usually kill anyone caught in them (unless you have absurd amount of HP for the area you're in), meaning you rarely, if ever, see what animation is supposed to end the attack regularly. The unique animation in many players eyes could very well just be THAT animation, that was triggered by some bug or glitch. It's not like DS, even in the remastered, is remotely free of minor and major glitches so this is an extremely reasonable possibility
@@ZullietheWitch The enemies most likely to grab you that actually have a unique grab escape animation (while sure most of these have a unique animation there's a difference between the animation existing and it being noticeable to a panicking player. Like, the mimic has a pretty noticeable escape but also uh, you probably died) are also the ones that are going to kill you stone dead whether you mash or not, so any grab escape you do see, like against gaping dragon for example, is mystifying, and the first answer to a mystery like that is "must be a glitch". And indeed, a large number of players don't mash or even think it's possible in the first place.
See, the most interesting thing for me is learning about all the things that DO have grab attacks. Like, a wee bit over half of these things I have never known had grab attacks. Pretty NITO if you ask me. ... I'll leave now.
I like the way some of them just look at you afterwards with an awkward pause like "oh... Was that not cool of me? Was that rude?" Or they're astonished that nobody usually escapes haha.
I never thought that it was possible to fight against Grabs. And I have never experienced a grab by Nito in my countless hours in Dark Souls 1. Very interesting!
Just wanted to say you're the best for doing all this stuff. I really appreciate it personally. So many questions left unanswered really bogs me down sometimes and this is just pure euphoria finding all this information out.
I never realized that Nito has a grab attack, must be really rare cuz I haven't seen it even with 400+ hours into the game. Guess you could say this was pretty nito to discover.
It only happens when you're a certain distance from him, and it's super easy to dodge or just avoid. Usually you'll be further away from him or right up in there whacking him. Maybe it happens more to people playing a ranged build
Fun fact: if Nito touches any of his skeletons, he deals a good amount of damage (or kill). But if he touches you, he just grabs you, and doesn't do damage until a second or two after you get grabbed ^^
The first time playing Dark Souls, I forgot entirely about swapping to two-handed grip with weapons. But when I was fighting the Gaping dragon and mashing buttons to escape, I accidentally hit X to swap to two-handed mode, and then was too caught up in the fight after I escaped to notice. The extra damage ended up being exactly what I needed to kill the dragon, and I only realized what had happened after the battle. It taught me the valuable lesson of swapping to two-handed grip for the right situation, and that happened entirely because of a grab.
Making grabs escapable while having most of them deal huge that usually end with a quick death is the most “dark souls” thing the DS games could have done.
Thank you for this, though my rage is absolutely endless that it took me this long to find out, im glad you showed us so i didn't die without knowing..., again.
Hey Zullie I recently heard that the fiery thing on bed of chaos has a standing up animation it uses when you first enter its arena. Could you perhaps zoom in on it in a video if it's true? I never saw it before and I didn't find it on YT
This is so funny, I read about all this on the wikidot just last night, stumbled across by accident. I didn't even know you could escape grabs in 1 before yesterday, and yesterday you showed us all of them! Love it.
I'd guess that one grab is weird because of development issues, since it's in Izalith. Possibly something to do with needing animations for the escape, though it looks like it could just use the same player animation as the oysters and mimics. Also that wouldn't explain why the chaos eater grab was able to have a unique animation. Maybe it's reused from how you could climb up ledges in Demon's Souls? ... Or just ladder climbing durr. And speaking of them I'm surprised that's one of the grabs you can escape.
This is why I follow Zullie. I have not even seen the animation of multiple of these grabs, let alone the escape. It is a mechanic that I forgot even existed.
I played this game for the first time last month, and idk why it seemed obvious to me that mashing buttons would break out of a grab. Maybe because I played Resident Evil 1 a lot ?
For those wondering how players can think it's a glitch, I'm guessing it's because some animations don't really look like the character is escaping but more like the boss got bored or bugged out. Like the gaping dragon one, it looks like he dropped you instead of you wriggling out of it maw. Same with that big centipede fella at 1:47 there's actually no throw escape and players are more likely to be grabbed by them. Although I wish they kept the Kalameet one, yeah I know "BUT MA CHALLMENGE!" but it would of been cool to give a big middle finger to him. Maybe grab escapes can be based on your character's strength stat but for Kalameet it's based on your character INT stat.
haven't seen a lot of grabs here, even the obvious ones like the chaos eater, I was so afraid of that imminent grab that I just ran through the creature. Now I know how terrifying it would be to really fight them and maybe get grabed...
I like how no one knew how to escape grabs. I started out in dark souls 3 and the first grab escape I saw was the coolest one ever. It’s to the pontiff dogs. They can grab you in their jaws and crush you. But if you fight out fast enough, your character will stand up, holding their jaw open, and jump out. So cool…
0:40 Back in the day I think ENB accidentally spread this rumor by mistakenly saying the grab mechanic was a glitch. I vaguely recall something about how ENB heard it from Miyazaki himself that it wasn't intended, or something? Always been left wondering if it was just some obscure mechanic that somebody programmed in and didn't tell anybody, although there's pretty clearly different animations for grab escapes, so...
Is there a limit to how many inputs the game detects every X frames? Or if you mash frame perfectly can you escape in 25 frames? Also along with the fastest time to escape how many ticks of damage can you take from each grab? Or is there a minimum of at least a single tick of damage no matter how fast you escape? Many questions, sorry if it sounds like I'm asking as if you already know, I wish I knew how to test these out myself, looks like fun content for a Limit Breakers video or something lol
There's a value in the throw param called SelfEscCycleTime that's set to 100 for every throw, which I think makes it so it checks if you did an input every 100ms.
well, since the game doesn't even hint you about it, and the number of attacks being so high, in the heat of surviving a grab attack i woulda thought it was a glitch too
1:10 That is one of the most terrifying creatures in all of DS; I don't know why it was used in so few places. Seriously, what creature is more horrifying than that? (Yes, I know its mouth is a lamprey eel.)
I did already know about this! I think I discovered it on my own during my earlier playthroughs. I had figured there is no way there's zero counter to grab attacks, so I tested it a bunch of the trees and found out mashing the bumpers works! But TIL if you fall onto one of the chaos eaters from above you get sucked into their blender...
At the risk of sounding like “that guy” who acts like they know everything, it’s amazing to me that some people don’t know this, and even more amazing that some people think it’s a glitch. Mashing buttons is pretty much video game shorthand for breaking out of grabs, recovering from stuns, etc and has been commonplace as far back as the original arcade Punch-Out!!! or maybe even earlier and I honestly thought that anyone who played video games just had it in their muscle memory to mash buttons to try to break out of stuff like this. Add on the fact that most of these have very distinct animations from just waiting the grab out and it would seem obvious that it’s not a glitch either
if there is anything I learned in my young life, it's that escape from most things involves mashing buttons, and now that I know they for sure work, I will become unstoppable
I have quite a few hours in these games, and while I knew about the grab escapes, it didn’t know the full scope of just how many you could escape from. I didn’t even know the clams could grab you.
I don't think I've ever been grabbed by those giant tooth filled mouth enemies outside the run up to BoC, therefore have never had the luxury of seeing all those teeth *shudders*, I usually just book in past this entire area. Also had no idea getting out of a mimic grab was possible unless you puts tons of points into HP and could survive the bites.. the more you know! lol
The escape is clearly not a glitch, since the animations seem quiet different when you do a throw escape. But no one ever notices that because AH! LET ME GO LET ME GO LET ME GO, NO, NO, NO, NO NO!
Back when I was playing Prepare to Die edition, I had a friend who swore that you're just dead if a mimic grabs you, but I kept telling him that you can just spam "A" in order to escape, but he never believed me at the time.
I figured u could resist grabs but I never knew what the hell I was doing. I'd be like oh look if I press something it looks like it helps. I noticed it originally on the blobs that fall. Great informative video!
![I.N "HALLUCINATION" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/n5B5q1Hwt_U/mqdefault.jpg)
I meant to check this before, but forgot to. You don't need to specifically use R1/L1. R2/L2 both work, and even A/B/X/Y (or the Playstation equivalents).
Stranger still, stick movements can decrease the grab HP, but it's kind of weird about how it registers it.
I decided to search around a bit for the origin of the rumor that escaping grabs was a glitch and found out it may trace back to a quote from EpicNameBro in this video:
ruclips.net/video/uA48RCLNX2A/видео.html
Can you somehow bring the grab hp immediately to zero will that free you faster or no?
Sticks are probably triggering spam protection - because they are changing their state almost instantly.
I think that PC's keyboard doesn't have such an issue?
But do you need to press different buttons every time, or can you spam R1 or R2 only for example and still escape ?
@@domenico-_-602 Yes, the whole system is pretty much the same, though the specific Escape HP values might be different.
@@RandomPerson13 lmao I was thinking the same thing
"Players think throw escapes are a glitch" *Player character literally has special animation for getting out of grabs*
Lol, like when some people thought that the escaping from ceaseless discharge was a glitch, even though it has literally an animation to it jumping and dying
@@danielebrunetti853 Anche il Golem di ferro
@@danielebrunetti853 Lo hai scoperto da Sabaku per caso? Blind Run di Cydo? Chiedo visto che è successo di recente lol
A lot of the animations are pretty subtle
@@CPU9incarnate especially when you're panicking because you've just been grab attacked
Look at the wobbly camera movement they added to Gaping Dragon's grab. Someone was having fun.
This camera movement kinda reminds me of This long bridge in Ds2 ( in dragon eerie)
@@slay-r349 Dragon Aerie still top 5 Souls location in my book.
I was gonna ask if that was actually in the game like that, that's really neat. They seem to have gone all-out when designing Federico
@@RamAurelius yeah, dragon eerie and dragon shrine are beautiful locations
Not gonna lie, the name “Gaping Dragon” makes me uncomfortable
If only Siegmeyer knew how to button mash, then he wouldn't have to die in all of my playthroughs.
If you wait to wake him up and instead snipe the monsters (idk their actual name), he'll survive more often. Snipe all but one, not including the hiding one, and then speak with him. If he bugs and doesn't move, save and quit, reload, and he'll be down in the mud fighting.
If you're talking about the pit with 4 chaos eaters, BEFORE TALKING TO HIM snipe 3 of them to death and leave the 4th one with a bit of health.
Let Siegmeyer drop down and kill.
If you kill all of them before Siegmeyer drops down, he gives you a ring and the quest ends there (last step of the quest won't be available).
If Siegmeyer ends with less than half health, you fail his quest.
You probably already know this but I'm writing for other people to see too 👍🏻
mine was somehow atrociously godly and dealt 630 damage per swing and solo'd them pretty easily. i just watched in awe. judging by what plenty of people say he's supposed to have trouble against the chaos eaters?
@@Darkirion1 From my experience it seems like one grab attack is all it takes for him to kick the bucket.
@@MudkipMan97 Siegmeyers journey is the most bullshit "quest" in all of Dark Souls tbh. There's no way anyone can do it without looking things up beforehand
I love that the mimic has the audacity to continue pretending to be a chest after he surprises and half eats you but you escape. It's like it thinks "Crap, they weren't supposed to do that. Well maybe they'll think I went away and open me again..."
That's a good comment but I think it's because he has AI disabled outside of that attack, if you will, notice how they all stop attacking after they escape a grab.
@@ollie7070 I think mimics do just return to their idle state if opening them caused a grab. I vaguely recall a time where I was with a friend in his world and I went "Oooh, chest!" knowing full well it was a mimic and had it munch on me. I lived, and it remained sitting there.
@@Gatoras_Blade "C'mon, I won't do it again, next time there'll be treasure I promise!"
@@noatrope
Narcisstic mimic gaslighting you into more abuse. 😂
Maybe they think you'll assume it was a hallucination? XD
the animation for getting out of the blender thing is extremely hilarious.
Yea its like they got bored of the teacup ride and called it a day
Chosen Undead: "Aight Imma Head Out"
"This is lame"
@@TheguyfromJurassicpark3 out the teacup and into Gwyndolin
thanks for calling it blender™ thing instead of toilet thing
Character: *performs a unique action to escape a grab
Players: "Looks like a bug to me"
The player model is clearly glitching out here no doubt. The climb out of the Chaos Eater? Random flailing.
There is no grab struggle animation to let the player know that mashing does anything unlike in most other games.
So it does look like a bug when your character isn't doing anything then the attack ends early for seemingly no reason like the gaping dragon/centipede demon.
@@Warcrafter4 I guess that's true, but DS1 was rushed, so it doesn't surprise me they didn't animate the player struggling to break free.
@@j.k.4479 the struggle animation isnt different its the escape animation, lmao.
@@keighne7650 By struggle animation I am talking about having the character move their arms and legs when inputs are received by the game. Kinda like a QTE when you mash a button or key you can see the character resist/push with each input.
How have I played this game religiously for 8+ years and I'm STILL finding out new things I had no idea about?
@@wowwhatacleverandoriginaln9416 Hey, I also didn't know about this. I just kinda assumed getting grabbed, especially by mimics, meant (almost-) instant death. I think there isn't a single loading screen tip telling you that you can wriggle free in any of the souls games...
Cause you ain't a programmer.
Even if you were, how would you go through all this?
Life is fleeting. We can never really be that knowledgeable at something as we think we are.
Lol I thought the same. My friend and I had different builds. I was a tank, he was a wizard. I would always laugh when he got grabbed cause we both assumed it was an inescapable death
@@wowwhatacleverandoriginaln9416 I knew about grab escape but I didn't know you had to do it exactly 25 times to escape all grapples. I just assumed it was harder depending on the enemy.
By avoiding grabs like the plague?
WOW I've never seen the animations for crawling out of the Chaos Eaters.. so cool
I've never even seen that grab, period. It looks like it should be accompanied by a toilet flushing sound
Broke the dark mood for me, a toilet flushing sound is very appropriate for how I felt about Dark Souls after facing them
I know that DS isn't type type of game to flash "MASH R1 TO ESCAPE" on screen, but it would have been nice for there to be some way for the game to tell the player that this is a mechanic.
True, maybe even a part of undead asylum that tells you this and has a slime drop on you or something
I always mash in case it works. Wasn't mashing L1 though.
Are you telling me you don't instantly panic mash everything when you get grabbed ?
@@bongosmcdongos4190 Are you telling me you don't just accept your inevitable demise the moment you are grabbed?
@@Hollow__Heart yes
There's some really rad grab escape animations in later games. One of my favorites is against the fish women in Fishing Hamlet. They mount you and start hacking away at you with their cleaver but if you escape, you catch the blade before a final vicious face chop and struggle out from under them.
Wait, thats bloodborne right?
@@alfredparker4369 yeah
@@nickkelly3199 cool!
Can you do it on every Souls game?
@@eduardoledesma5568 yeah i think so? not in demons souls though
I seen all these grab attacks except the Centipede Demon one, pretty cool how he stuffs you in his fiery chest
Ikr!
The funny thing is that the centipede's grab is also the way to glitch the bossfight, if it grabs you near the wall. Lol.
if it grabs u in the left corner when u enter the boss arena he will glitch out of bounds and die lol
Yeah, I've never seen Nito do a grab attack, he only explodes and pokes new holes into me from the bottom in my playthroughs...
The Cetipede grabed me often
But I think I never took damage from it
Smashed my buttons to fast
The “grab HP” sheds so much light on this grab escape seeing how some grabs (like centipede) you can escape with basically no damage taken since the grab itself with the grab HP starts so early
I HAD NO IDEA IT WAS EVEN _POSSIBLE_ TO ESCAPE THESE, WTF
This could have prevented SO many deaths for me...
Grapple breaking like this is a thing in a lot of games, so many that I always instinctively mash the shoulder buttons in any game when I get grabbed. Then again I also always hold A as soon as the Pokeball passes the front of the Pokemon's sprite, so I guess I'm conditioned to believe in the unspoken magic of button holding/mashing
@@chompythebeast interesting that you were conditioned to smash the shoulder buttons. I always instinctively smash the face buttons because those are much more common in games with grapple attacks in my experience.
Yeah I was fortunate enough to have an experienced souls player tell me to mash buttons when I get grabbed when I first encountered the fleshy werewolf looking people in blight town. Without escaping the grab they would one hit kill me, if I mashed the buttons it would do a pathetic amount of damage, the difference is insane.
yesterday I've lost 100000 souls two times
because of a ds2 hitbox like grab
@@KateHikes83TJD The thing that makes DaS2's grabs so shitty is that they don't interrupt player animations, so it'll _look_ like you rolled out of it, but then you'll be snapped back to the grab once that animation has finished, making it look like you got screwed by the hitbox. In the other games the animation is just interrupted so it looks less bullshitty, though you may notice that some of those interrupted animations look pretty awkward or unnatural sometimes, especially in 1.
I assume that at one point they wanted to make 2 more polished with better transition animations, but simply ran out of time
The only animation that I've seen that shows you actually writhing when you spam the buttons is in DS3 when Stray Demon grabs you. Wish they showed that more so it's more obvious you're trying to counter the grab.
It's also the only grab (afaik) that you can escape in DS3
@@Yorikoification Yeah, this is kind of what I mean. When you do the escape on any grab animation it is effectively an escape, but it just the same animation but shorter. The stray demon grab I mentioned actually shows you wiggle then escape, and that's what I wanted to see more of.
@@Yorikoification at the very least, you can also mash out of the giant uh... hand baby thing grabs. I vaguely recall people saying that the stray demon's grab was the only one you could escape, but that's definitely not true. ruclips.net/video/Zuny57g6olY/видео.html this video demonstrates it, damage seems to be about halved and the animation changes.
I think it worked on mimics and crabs as well, iirc your player even jiggles a bit while you mash out of crab grabs. I suspect the jiggling might have also been a thing with some grabs in DS2, I definitely remember seeing it a bunch of times and I didn't play 3 nearly as much as 1 or 2.
@@HotClown yes i noticed early on in ds3 play that mashing r1 & l1 reduced the length & damage of the grabs. The lycanthrope grab is another it works on.
Its hard to see but you do actually push them with your right or left arm depenending on which button you push
I still remember the first time I tried to plunge attack a Chaos Eater. It didn't dawn on me why I shouldn't, until it was too late...
Props to the animators, a lot of these have very satisfying animations, I especially like the mimics' ones where you kick off of it
I love the landing from most of the boss escapes. Character just looks absolutely done with the boss.
It is interesting how much detail have the chaos eaters, despite being in izalith, which is probably the most rushed location in ds
Well it also has some of the least used enemies too. Different teams worked on enemy designs vs level designs.
Enemy design team was on point, but clearly level designers were lagging behind after they finished the Undead settlement, the Depths, Sen's Fortress, Blighttown, Forest zones, Seeth's Archives, and Kiln of the first flame.
@@AntiNihilist "enemy design team was on point" lmao tell that to the dragon leg enemies
@@roachdoggjr155 I feel like that's the biggest mystery in the souls series. Obviously Miyazaki had SOME plan for them, and I refuse to believe that they were always supposed to just crowd that lava pit the way they did.
The weirdest part is that Izalith has no connection to the dragons at all so the only explanation is that either just the dragon legs or fully formed decrepit dragons all wandered up to Izalith from Ash Lake for...no reason...
Like, if those dragons legs were throughout Ash Lake then that makes tons of sense, leftover cut up dragons from the war who can't die. Possibly those affected by Nito's power???
too many cool possibilities, not enough actual facts...
the enemy designers did their jobs right I'm sure
@@roachdoggjr155 That's more the fault of the level designers than the enemy designers. The dragon legs were probably supposed to be a miniboss, the missing lower half of the poison dragon in Valley of the Drakes. But since they ran out of time the level designers just placed a bunch of them around Lost Izalith to make it less empty.
climbing out of the blender demons looool. also it's hilarious watching the devour escapes where they just spit you out cuz you taste bad.
I feel like most people didn't know this for the fact most of these do insane damage so no amount of mashing let's you survive (mimics and the soul eaters come to mind)
This exactly, I always tried to free myself from the grab but no matter how many times I smashed the buttons my hp bar dried too fast.
Why is the Gaping Dragon’s grab so cinematic?
Why not?! 👌
some ripostes have that same effect
its kinda weird but cool
is boss
More like why is the gaping dragon so cinematic? A super easy, skippable boss in a halfway area that has little to nothing to do with the story or main objectives by all rights should not be the most visually iconic boss in the game but here we are
K i n o
I always accepted my fate when getting grabbed and just prayed to have enough HP to survive, knowing this adds a little hope now.
it's absolutely amazing how much stuff has been packed into this game. Just think of all the weird, quirky systems that are at work here - how the world shifts and adjusts around you, the unique online system, vagrants, miracles being visible across worlds, many different world areas, the level design, world lore, bosses, a ton of different unique weapons with a bunch of different movesets, magic, bows, parries, staggers, environments influencing fights, status effects, and a shit ton of different animations to illustrate all of this happening. Some of these things are so well hidden not even people with +500 hours know about them.
DS1 has so much in it, so many little details that were meticulously crafted for our experience, to make it really believable and immersive. Most games don't reach this level of detail even after 10 DLCs and years of additional development, and DS doesn't even bother pointing it all out - it just lets you figure it all for yourself. Truly incredible.
DS is a truly special game for all of these reasons.
They really should have added a ring called the grease ring that makes each button press do 5 grab damage along with increasing fire damage done and received.
I wouldn't say 5, maybe 2 or 3
Reminds me of Cr1TiKaL
I didn't know most of those grabs existed, it's really nice to see more of a game without the risk of losing thousands of souls. (I knew about escapes from ymfah runs)
Yeah, the rolly cat grab was pretty surprising. Had no idea that was a grab.
Some of these I knew they had grabs but I'd never actually been hit by it so it was still cool to see.
0:11 this is the funniest grab, the way it just kinda boops you while you weakly flop your arms a little never fails to amuse
I didn't even know you could escape grabs. This would've saved me some serious frustration
TIL clams have a crab attack. Good thing it only took 500+ hours to realise this
I know you meant grab attack but this is so much funnier
@@sabotower1792 I mean crabs have grab attacks so am I even wrong? ;)
Time for crab!
@@gosucab944 You absolutely aren't wrong but imagine you get attacked by a clam and then inside of the clam is a slightly smaller crab and then that murders you
I kind of learned about this mechanic by myself, naturally hitting the buttons as a reaction to being grabbed. Didn't realize, that there was a specific counter, though.
And instead of clicking both attack buttons (on the mouse), I only used one, hence the death on NG+. It makes me realize, that there are different ways, through which people learn things.
never thought I'd fight against grabs
I never knew the cats had a grab. I'd just see them spinball from place to place on sight.
How could anyone think it's a glitch when there's a custom animation for it? Two animations if you think about it. Two animations that sync up with each other.
I've wondered about that myself. I think it's probably players who only played through once or twice and didn't really see many grabs mostly just hearing about the escape mechanic rather than experiencing it much first hand.
Also for the latter half of the video there doesn't seem to be much different animations you just stop taking damage
Because this grab attacks usually kill anyone caught in them (unless you have absurd amount of HP for the area you're in), meaning you rarely, if ever, see what animation is supposed to end the attack regularly. The unique animation in many players eyes could very well just be THAT animation, that was triggered by some bug or glitch. It's not like DS, even in the remastered, is remotely free of minor and major glitches so this is an extremely reasonable possibility
@@devial9879 I also was never spamming as hard as I could because this mechanic was unknown to me. So I had no chance
@@ZullietheWitch The enemies most likely to grab you that actually have a unique grab escape animation (while sure most of these have a unique animation there's a difference between the animation existing and it being noticeable to a panicking player. Like, the mimic has a pretty noticeable escape but also uh, you probably died) are also the ones that are going to kill you stone dead whether you mash or not, so any grab escape you do see, like against gaping dragon for example, is mystifying, and the first answer to a mystery like that is "must be a glitch".
And indeed, a large number of players don't mash or even think it's possible in the first place.
Zullie you are an absolute treasure
Hopefully not a mimic
Amazing trap ahead? :D
See, the most interesting thing for me is learning about all the things that DO have grab attacks. Like, a wee bit over half of these things I have never known had grab attacks. Pretty NITO if you ask me.
...
I'll leave now.
I like the way some of them just look at you afterwards with an awkward pause like "oh... Was that not cool of me? Was that rude?" Or they're astonished that nobody usually escapes haha.
Every grab in the game: low volume
Kalameet: Reeeeeeeee
Tinnitus inducer
I've played this game for years and this is the first time I've learnt about this mechanic
I never thought that it was possible to fight against Grabs. And I have never experienced a grab by Nito in my countless hours in Dark Souls 1. Very interesting!
@@wowwhatacleverandoriginaln9416 I never tried it. I am just like "aww man, really?!" and watch at me dying or getting out of it with low HP.
Just wanted to say you're the best for doing all this stuff. I really appreciate it personally. So many questions left unanswered really bogs me down sometimes and this is just pure euphoria finding all this information out.
Played through each game in the trilogy at least 4+ times and never knew this, this information would've saved me so many headaches and lost souls 😂
Never seen a chaos eater grab before, gives me some appreciation for the hideous things.
I never realized that Nito has a grab attack, must be really rare cuz I haven't seen it even with 400+ hours into the game.
Guess you could say this was pretty nito to discover.
isn't rare at all .-.
@@jak9313 I've never seen it In any of my 200 hours into the game. So it just depends on the person.
It only happens when you're a certain distance from him, and it's super easy to dodge or just avoid. Usually you'll be further away from him or right up in there whacking him. Maybe it happens more to people playing a ranged build
Fun fact: if Nito touches any of his skeletons, he deals a good amount of damage (or kill). But if he touches you, he just grabs you, and doesn't do damage until a second or two after you get grabbed ^^
it's the attack where he slides forward a lot while reaching out with his glowing left hand. Maybe you just didn't know it was a grab?
The first time playing Dark Souls, I forgot entirely about swapping to two-handed grip with weapons. But when I was fighting the Gaping dragon and mashing buttons to escape, I accidentally hit X to swap to two-handed mode, and then was too caught up in the fight after I escaped to notice. The extra damage ended up being exactly what I needed to kill the dragon, and I only realized what had happened after the battle.
It taught me the valuable lesson of swapping to two-handed grip for the right situation, and that happened entirely because of a grab.
Making grabs escapable while having most of them deal huge that usually end with a quick death is the most “dark souls” thing the DS games could have done.
Thank you for this, though my rage is absolutely endless that it took me this long to find out, im glad you showed us so i didn't die without knowing..., again.
Hey Zullie I recently heard that the fiery thing on bed of chaos has a standing up animation it uses when you first enter its arena. Could you perhaps zoom in on it in a video if it's true? I never saw it before and I didn't find it on YT
she did that before.
They already did: watch?v=_URxg8B9hoU
@@TakunaNuva thanks!
@@TakunaNuva can you send the full link? Im on phone
@@wilaugh8688 ruclips.net/video/_URxg8B9hoU/видео.html
1:11 I love the animation, is like "Okay, time's up, bye bye plant", you casually climb out of its mouth
Never really looked that closely at the player character animations in these grab attacks but man, some of them are extra janky.
This is so funny, I read about all this on the wikidot just last night, stumbled across by accident. I didn't even know you could escape grabs in 1 before yesterday, and yesterday you showed us all of them! Love it.
I'd guess that one grab is weird because of development issues, since it's in Izalith. Possibly something to do with needing animations for the escape, though it looks like it could just use the same player animation as the oysters and mimics.
Also that wouldn't explain why the chaos eater grab was able to have a unique animation. Maybe it's reused from how you could climb up ledges in Demon's Souls? ... Or just ladder climbing durr. And speaking of them I'm surprised that's one of the grabs you can escape.
This is why I follow Zullie. I have not even seen the animation of multiple of these grabs, let alone the escape. It is a mechanic that I forgot even existed.
2:41 I thought this was Dark Souls? What the frickaroni is a Nargacuga doing in Dark Souls?
Three minutes of a woman's pained moans? All right, I'll watch.
Hey Zullie, can you show us where exactly does the hellkite come from on the undead burg, and where does it head off to in subsequent areas?
I second this!
I hadn't noticed the red flowers on the Dusk set until this video!
I love all of this stuff so much
I had absolutely no idea escaping a grab was possible in this game.
I played this game for the first time last month, and idk why it seemed obvious to me that mashing buttons would break out of a grab.
Maybe because I played Resident Evil 1 a lot ?
How could players think that it's a glitch when it has special animations? If someone truly believed it, he/she is dumb
For those wondering how players can think it's a glitch, I'm guessing it's because some animations don't really look like the character is escaping but more like the boss got bored or bugged out. Like the gaping dragon one, it looks like he dropped you instead of you wriggling out of it maw. Same with that big centipede fella at 1:47 there's actually no throw escape and players are more likely to be grabbed by them.
Although I wish they kept the Kalameet one, yeah I know "BUT MA CHALLMENGE!" but it would of been cool to give a big middle finger to him. Maybe grab escapes can be based on your character's strength stat but for Kalameet it's based on your character INT stat.
Nito's escape always looked the coolest in my opinion. Big anime energy.
haven't seen a lot of grabs here, even the obvious ones like the chaos eater, I was so afraid of that imminent grab that I just ran through the creature. Now I know how terrifying it would be to really fight them and maybe get grabed...
I've cleared NG+3 and this video is the first time I know Gaping Dragon and Centipede Demon have grab attacks...
I just wanna quickly say that I really like how much you're engaging with people that are having questions in the comments
♥
I like how no one knew how to escape grabs. I started out in dark souls 3 and the first grab escape I saw was the coolest one ever. It’s to the pontiff dogs. They can grab you in their jaws and crush you. But if you fight out fast enough, your character will stand up, holding their jaw open, and jump out. So cool…
0:40 Back in the day I think ENB accidentally spread this rumor by mistakenly saying the grab mechanic was a glitch. I vaguely recall something about how ENB heard it from Miyazaki himself that it wasn't intended, or something? Always been left wondering if it was just some obscure mechanic that somebody programmed in and didn't tell anybody, although there's pretty clearly different animations for grab escapes, so...
I am in a car and it is raining
Nice
@@Felicificity it stopped raining
You're so precious for DKS's community ! Thanks a lot for what you've done
Is there a limit to how many inputs the game detects every X frames? Or if you mash frame perfectly can you escape in 25 frames?
Also along with the fastest time to escape how many ticks of damage can you take from each grab? Or is there a minimum of at least a single tick of damage no matter how fast you escape?
Many questions, sorry if it sounds like I'm asking as if you already know, I wish I knew how to test these out myself, looks like fun content for a Limit Breakers video or something lol
There's a value in the throw param called SelfEscCycleTime that's set to 100 for every throw, which I think makes it so it checks if you did an input every 100ms.
I read this as "every crab you can break out of" and I was terrified yet intrigued
Dark Souls as a series is really just a crab
"Some players believe escaping grabd is a glitch" lol there's specific animations for the escapes, how the f it can be a glitch kkkkkkk
well, since the game doesn't even hint you about it, and the number of attacks being so high, in the heat of surviving a grab attack i woulda thought it was a glitch too
Wow, I actually thought that wouldn't be a thing. I remember trying it every now and then. Cool to see it actually working though!
Day 14 of simping for Zullie
this is why i fell in love with darksouls, i never knew you can escape from grab animations till today.
Nito's grab kinda reassembles the special draining move from the dark hand. Also makes him kinda look like a precursor of dark wraiths.
Pretty awesome-looking animation too! I haven't seen like half of these ever. :D
1:10 That is one of the most terrifying creatures in all of DS; I don't know why it was used in so few places.
Seriously, what creature is more horrifying than that?
(Yes, I know its mouth is a lamprey eel.)
I’ve always done this thinking it doesn’t do anything, but just out of hope that that’ll do something, glad I got confirmation
THANK YOU! This is so helpful I'm not even (that) angry you have no witch armour, weapons, or spells.
I did already know about this! I think I discovered it on my own during my earlier playthroughs. I had figured there is no way there's zero counter to grab attacks, so I tested it a bunch of the trees and found out mashing the bumpers works!
But TIL if you fall onto one of the chaos eaters from above you get sucked into their blender...
At the risk of sounding like “that guy” who acts like they know everything, it’s amazing to me that some people don’t know this, and even more amazing that some people think it’s a glitch.
Mashing buttons is pretty much video game shorthand for breaking out of grabs, recovering from stuns, etc and has been commonplace as far back as the original arcade Punch-Out!!! or maybe even earlier and I honestly thought that anyone who played video games just had it in their muscle memory to mash buttons to try to break out of stuff like this.
Add on the fact that most of these have very distinct animations from just waiting the grab out and it would seem obvious that it’s not a glitch either
And here I thought I managed to get grabbed by every possible enemy, but I didn't even realize a couple of these guys had grab attacks.
acquired a new fetiche
You gotta admit, some of the grab animations themselves are pretty brutal
I had never even seen some of these grabs before. Good to see Dark Souls still has some things yet to be widely witnessed by the players.
I enjoyed just seeing a lot of the command throw animations. many of them i didn’t know existed because i’ve never personally triggered them
if there is anything I learned in my young life, it's that escape from most things involves mashing buttons, and now that I know they for sure work, I will become unstoppable
I have quite a few hours in these games, and while I knew about the grab escapes, it didn’t know the full scope of just how many you could escape from. I didn’t even know the clams could grab you.
I will never see DS1 the same again...you have sincerely blown my mind.
wow, there's a unique throw for getting out of a mimic grab
I think I discovered this by accident once, but completely forgot about it the next day.
I don't think I've ever been grabbed by those giant tooth filled mouth enemies outside the run up to BoC, therefore have never had the luxury of seeing all those teeth *shudders*, I usually just book in past this entire area. Also had no idea getting out of a mimic grab was possible unless you puts tons of points into HP and could survive the bites.. the more you know! lol
Just wanted to let you I love your stuff Zullie. Keep up the good work!
I’ll be honest I knew that you could do it but ty for breaking it down. Haven’t seen all the animations before this good video
The escape is clearly not a glitch, since the animations seem quiet different when you do a throw escape.
But no one ever notices that because AH! LET ME GO LET ME GO LET ME GO, NO, NO, NO, NO NO!
Omg! these games never stop surprising me with unexplained mechanics. Great video, thx for info.
Back when I was playing Prepare to Die edition, I had a friend who swore that you're just dead if a mimic grabs you, but I kept telling him that you can just spam "A" in order to escape, but he never believed me at the time.
Good thing to learn...
10 years after the games release...
Nice info , good to know after years of getting killed by those grabs !!!
I figured u could resist grabs but I never knew what the hell I was doing. I'd be like oh look if I press something it looks like it helps. I noticed it originally on the blobs that fall. Great informative video!