DARK SOULS: Help needed please!

[the saved]

So I realise that getdare may not be the best of places to ask for advice on a now two year old video game, but then I realised, a lot of you may be super cool people who game a lot like me!

Basically on my first playthrough of Dark Souls I have come to a tricky situation, here is what happened:

So I've been playing Dark Souls rather belatedly after picking it up in the Autumn Sale, and I've found myself at somewhat of a quandary.

Things have been progressing spiffingly, I beat the Taurus Demon second attempt, The Gargoyles first try, I thought, 'bah! Dark Souls isn't so tough!'. However, things started going wrong...

First of all I killed the Blacksmith guy, Andre I think his name was. Now you probably hate me for that, I do too, he seemed a cool guy, had a nice accent, but his gruesome and untimely death was an accident. You see, I dropped my controller, which caused my brave warrior to have a momentary lapse of judgement and strike the blacksmith with a heavy blow from my halberd. The blacksmith, clearly very grieved by my actions, decided to fight back, which of course led me to kill him. I did receive a hammer from him which seems like a pretty decent crushing weapon, but I hear that he was the only guy who could use the embers to make my weapons even better.

However, knowing this, I progressed thinking I would just have to rely on non-ember-upgraded weapons for the rest of the game, a challenge but no-biggie I thought. I am now at the Gaping Dragon. Along the way I got cursed by those frog bastards and thus my HP is halved.

So my question is, knowing that I now have to go back to the dude near the Gargoyles to remove the curse (which is a trek I really can't be bothered with), and knowing that my quest will be more difficult anyway without the blacksmith, should I merely restart with a new character? Or is it worth plowing on, I'm really not sure how much of a difference the Blacksmith makes at a later stage.

Any help would be appreciated,

(insert obligatory praise the sun here)

The Saved xx

[JJMORGIE]

Put simply..... restart. Trust me. Oh and I love your 'the man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed' line - opening to the best series ever, along with Game of Thrones.

[TheXXXPenguin]

I laughed my ass off when I saw it was tagged under "murder and poor life choices"

[xmetalmilitiax]

I know it's a bit late now but if you aggro a NPC you can run to undead church and pay Oswald of Carim who will pardon you and make everything better.

You don't necessarily need to restart though, you can still use unique weapons (twinkling titanite upgrades), which don't need a blacksmith, or go down Fire/Chaos or Magic/Enchanted paths.

Also, to de-curse you can buy purging stones from the female undead merchant by Undead Burg.

[the saved]

Sweet! Thanks for all the help guys means a lot. Just as sort of a general update, based on advice from both here and from another internet forum, I have decided to push on.

My weapon (halberd +5), and armour (I can't friggen remember what), are both pretty good right now, and I'm dealing with pretty much all enemies fairly easily. So I think I can push through to Anor Londo and then upgrade pretty heavily there. I mean people complete the game without levelling at all, so I think I should be alright, especially with unique weapons, it will just be a different experience. My next goal is to get the Black Knight's Halberd. My Halberd +5 is pretty badass right now and I love the attack animations so I think my next step is the BK Halberd.

Anyway on to more specific feedback. @JJMORGIE, thanks man! I love both of them series, the Dark Tower is my favourite though and I'm currently re-reading it for thethird time, so easy to get lost in that universe and also pick up little hints from the start that you wouldn't have noticed the first time through.

@TheXXXPenguin, haha cheers! Just a little easter egg for the fans you know?

@xmetalmilitiax, Yeah I found that out a little earlier and feel a right idiot now. Ahh well, the absolving sins thing when I first spoke to him didn't click with me and I thought it was just referring to PvP stuff :3. But yeah, thanks for the help!

But yeah, cheers everyone! And if I can be bothered I may keep you all updated with how things go, thanks!

[xmetalmilitiax]

Yeah levels aren't as important as upgraded gear, and the Black Knight Halberd doesn't need a special blacksmith to upgrade anyway, plus you can buy twinkling titanite in Anor Londo. For armour I generally use whatever looks cool and lets me fast roll, then upgrade that.