I don't really agree.

Did Naughty Dog confirm this or are you forming your own conclusion?

Was UP the first instance of this character arc?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLHwbukUU3c

This is a 2005 short French film about a woman being evicted from her house for construction, so she sews a giant sail, attaches it to her house, and flies away in it. It even has a few scenes that look remarkably close to the film UP.

My point? There are very, very few creative endeavours at this present day that you couldn't simply point to something earlier as being a source of inspiration or plagiarism. Some even argue that there are no unique ideas. Everything is simply a mashup of preexisting ideas.

Having played and beaten all of the souls games, I have to disagree with ya on Dark Souls having the best story telling in gaming. It was extremely light and it wasn't the focus of the game. It wasn't the story that kept people playing. It was the gameplay, atmosphere, difficulty, gamer euphoria and pvp of the game that kept people playing it. It's like you're saying a flat chested woman has big boobs. It just isn't true.

While I like the way the story is told(through in game item description), the ambiguity of the story is a sham.

I am under the school of thought that games that let you unravel the story through player interaction and exploration are the best ways to tell stories within video games.

Other examples is Metroid Prime (using the scan visor to uncover information and the story at large, which is completely optional) and Bioshock (going out of the way to discover Audio Diaries that expand the characters and story of the game). I love that type of story telling. ^_^

It's a joke from the article:

"Man loses loved one, becomes a bitter old man, years later he’s put into a situation where he must work with a kid he initially dislikes, and they eventually fight a crazy old man and his lackeys. You’d be forgiven if you thought I was talking about The Last of Us, which people have been heralding as the greatest story in gaming, but I was actually describing Up."

There's also the fact both love a girl named Ellie.  ILLUMINATI!

Don't get me wrong though, I'm not saying that the story of Dark Souls is the best. I'm saying the way in which the story is told is a cut above the rest. It actually uses the interactivity of a video game to its fullest while most games like TLoU for example, rely on scripted events and cut scenes almost exclusively. The game fades into the background when it's story time, when the game pretends to be a movie. On the other hand we have Dark souls where virtually everything, even the difficulty of the game, plays into its narrative.

By using everything at its disposal, the game can rapidly shift your perception of events with a handful of words, as seen by Talisman of beasts in Demon's Souls (spiritual/secret prequel to Dark Souls) or Darkmoon Seance Ring in Dark Souls.

Demons Souls did it first XD, sadly there isnt enough people out there uncovering every secret of it like Dark Souls had due to it being a multiplat.

From beginning to end I had no clue what was going on. So it does not get any kind of best story from me. It was good gameplay wise so that luckily worked.

Ummm... I played it for two hours and made little sense of what I was doing. So in my opinion, nope.