How to Git Gud, Really
'Git gud' is more than a meme, it's a lesson that takes time to truly learn, because it comes in stages, through personal growth and experience, and ends up being much more than just pushing yourself.
There’s a lie baked into the phrase “git gud.” and a lot of people — especially those who bounce off Souls games early — believe it. They think it means, parry better, dodge faster, obsess harder, grind until your wrists hurt and slam yourself into a boss until the RNG breaks your way…
That’s not what “git gud” actually means — not for anyone who’s made it past the early walls and kept going. The real path to getting good isn’t technical mastery. It’s your mindset, and your expectations.
What it actually means…
Pay attention to your problems.
Getting good means actually looking at what’s killing you — not just feeling frustrated that you failed again, but asking why.
Break the biggest challenges down.
That boss isn’t unbeatable, but maybe their second phase only kills you when you panic because you never solved the first phase cleanly. Work backwards. Break the challenge down into its component parts. Watch the animations, look for the timings, test what you can bait out and look for anywhere you already have control, check the environment for features that give you the ‘high ground’.
Solve one issue at a time.
If you roll too slow, fix your loadout. If you run out of heals, fix your pacing and move slower so you get hit less, relax to avoid over-reacting.
You’re not trying to solve the whole fight — you’re solving the next five seconds.
Know when to ask for help.
Co-op has rewards for both sides, and guides don’t just tell you what to do, but can make the world and its lore even more interesting or teach you entirely new ways of thinking about why an encounter was designed the way it was.
Nobody gets extra credit for being stubborn. Use the signs. Use the wiki. Get unstuck.
Use the tools.
Shields, summons, cheese, bleed builds, kiting, terrain, simply turn the music down. Heck in your first play-through, grind out or dupe-glitch those souls and over-level till diminishing returns if you’re really stuck at a vertical wall — they’re all valid.
The game doesn’t reward purity. It rewards adaptation.
Failure is part of the process.
Most games train you to fear death, or at least to tire of it. Dark Souls trains you to use it. Every run is data. Every mistake is a lesson.
Take a break.
Burnout makes you stupid. Walk away. Come back with fresh eyes.
Nine times out of ten, the thing you couldn’t beat yesterday drops in one try.
Don’t you dare go hollow.
That’s the only real failure state.
Quitting, disconnecting, giving up not just on the game, but on what it’s trying to teach you about how capable you really are.
'git gud’ isn’t about beating the game.
It’s about learning how to approach challenge itself, and this lesson is what you take into the world. It’s why Dark Souls for many ends up like a religious experience.
That’s what makes Souls games stick. That’s why they feel important. They don’t just punish you until you improve — they show you how to improve. and when you know what to look for, you can apply that to the world outside of Boletaria, Drangleic and Yharnam too.
The people who tell you “git gud” like you’re just not getting it exist everywhere, they kinda have a point, but they also probably don’t mean what you think they mean, if you haven’t been through the journey yet.
You don’t get good by brute force. You get good by paying attention, working on your environment and your attitude, and using all the tools you have to solve every problem in the most effective way you can.