Beaten on: 8/12/22
Hours Played: 34
Rating: 8/10

I started Dark Souls II the same night that I beat Dark Souls 1, I was still in the mood for a Souls game, and I figured it would give me some added perspective if I went from one into the other.

Dark Souls II is (mostly) universally the most panned of the SoulsBorne games, so I was really curious how I’d feel about it. I knew nothing going in, and since no one likes it, I hadn’t actually even seen any gameplay, unlike Dark Souls 1, of which I’d watched dozens of hours of content, so it was truly a blind playthrough.

In Souls games I usually like to play through the beginning, getting a few levels in endurance in vigor and then google some builds. I saw the Mace build as one of the better quality builds and figured that it was enough of a departure from my Claymore build in DS1 (I decided early on that I wanted to play each of the SoulsBorne games differently my first time through, Elden Ring I’m playing a dex/mage build).

Shortly after deciding on my build, I caved and decided to figure out why the hell I was so bad at dodging attacks hot off 30 hours in another Souls game. Turns out, they added a new stat in DS2 and it governs your rolling and iframes, not your equip load. This isn’t a change I was very fond of at first, because it just seemed like a throwaway stat you had to dump levels in to to get any kind of decent roll. As the game progressed, though, while I did have difficulty in a few areas, I felt like the game was very generous with souls. I beat the game at soul level 144, with enough souls on me to get to 148, and who knows what level with all the boss souls in my inventory.

I didn’t really talk about the story of DS1 at all, because I felt like anyone reading a DS1 review would already know the story. DS2 is a different story entirely, pun not intended. Beyond the assumption that less people know the story of DS2, I thought it was a lot easier to understand from within the game, just by playing. I did end up watching a “story explained” video, but beyond some of the links to DS1, I felt like I had picked up on most of the story, even some of the finer details just through playing it.

The Story/Levels of Dark Souls 2

Hopefully it was obvious based on that preamble, but if it wasn’t, there will be significant story spoilers for Dark Souls 2 below.

Intro

Just like in DS1, you are a cursed undead. You’re reborn in a kingdom called Drangleic that, as you later learn, has a violent and storied history. You find yourself in an area called Things Betwixt where you meet 3 former firekeepers; their presence together, in their hut, suggesting that they had abandoned their duties. After getting your Estus and some basic direction, you make your way through the area to emerge on a cliffside overlooking the water.

The town ahead, Majula, acts as your hub for this game, much like Firelink did in DS1, though it feels much more homey and like a place you might actually want to live in (within the context of a Souls game, at least). It’s here that you meet the Emerald Herald who gives your mission; gather 4 souls of the Old Ones, powerful beings who’s names have been lost to time.

Forest of the Fallen Giants

I don’t plan to discuss every area of the game (there are videos and articles that explain things better than I could ever hope to). I do however, want to mention the second area of the game which is The Forest of Fallen Giants, our first clue to the mystery of Drangleic. It’s also here that I began to have a glimmer of hope for DS2; the game might not be exclusively a dark and drab place devoid of anything that doesn’t want to kill you. Even the more “alive” areas of DS1, like the Darkroot Garden are dark and dingy places. While I think that aesthetic works well (and did work well in DS1), I think not having any moments to break it up (beyond Anor Londo, I suppose, which I think, while bright, was still an extremely sterile and lifeless place) really took away from my enjoyment in the latter half of the game. DS2 in contrast starts you out in a dark and dreary underground area (with darker and drearier sections) and gives you this beautiful waterfront and a little village that you could kind of imagine having life once upon a time, and then it sends you to a lush forest with water and visual storytelling. I don’t have much to say about this area beyond my commentary on the visuals, but I will mention it’s here that you meet one of the more interesting bosses in the game, The Pursuer.

The Pursuer is a boss, which, as his name implies pursues you. You might think, like I did, that it’s a reference to his past or even his moveset (he has a large dashing attack), but you find out pretty quickly that it’s actually referencing his pursuance of you, The Chosen Undead, throughout your playthrough. While he, in typical Fromsoft fashion, shows up in the most annoying places and can be a real bastard at times, he’s a fun boss and I think having someone that scales with your levels (or maybe your area, I’m not sure) is a fun way of demonstrating how you’ve progressed and how your weapons work on someone with the same moveset throughout different points.

I know I said I wasn’t going to talk about every area of the game, but if I keep thinking of things to comment on, I might.

Heide’s Tower of Flame

After Forest of the Fallen Giants you can go to Heide’s Tower of Flame, where you’re supposed to fight a Dragonrider. The part I want to comment on isn’t the boss of the area, but a mini-boss(?) that’s in the same section. There’s a Guardian Dragon that, due to it’s positioning, is extremely hard to get to with a melee weapon and I think, like it did for me, this section demonstrates how useful ranged attacks can be, even as a secondary, in DS2. I don’t think I ever bothered with range in any of my DS1 (attempted) playthroughs, but this one mini-boss made me consider keeping it around as a secondary option, despite a primary melee (mace) build.

Cathedral of the Blue

And, continuing in contrarian fashion, the next section of the game is the Cathedral of the Blue, whose boss is an Old Dragonslayer. The Old Dragonslayer is pretty much identical to Ornstein from DS1. This was the first time I got a reference (albeit a very obvious one) to DS1 and I thought it was a good way of telling players that the games are connected, and that they should maybe pay a little more attention to things throughout their journey. Beating this boss also presents you the opportunity to join your first covenant of the game, the Blue Sentinel Covenant, which I think implies that Ornstein may have been a member of this covenant at one point in time, given the Old Dragonslayer that needs to beaten before joining.

Alright. At this point I might abandon hope of skipping any section. Looking at the list of levels in the game, most of them have something worth mentioning; the level design is just so varied and in most cases, thoughtful.

No-Man’s Wharf

No-Man’s Wharf is the next section in the game, and it’s one of my favorite early game areas. After running through a few areas that feel strictly fantasy themed we get to an area that immediately felt pirate themed to me and it was jarring (in a good way). The other things worth mentioning about this area are the Pharros’ Lockstone in the area, and the ending. The Pharros’ Lockstone I’m referencing lights a pyre(?) in the center of the area which not only changes the mood of the area some, but it also makes the Darkdweller’s stay inside, away from the light. I can’t think of any other instances in DS2 or DS1 where a non-boss activity changes an area to that extent. The ending of this area is the last thing I wanted to touch on. Once you make your way through to the end (and unlock your shortcut) there’s a bell you can ring. And what does ringing this bell do? It summons a fucking ghost pirate ship. It’s pretty on the nose for the area, but it was so cool.

The Lost Bastille

The area directly following No-Man’s Wharf is The Lost Bastille, and I was actually going to skip over this section, but when I was reading the guide for it to jog my memory, I just learned that there’s actually two ways to get here, the first of which I completely skipped over in favor of going to No-Man’s Wharf. There are a couple places like this in DS1 (most notably unlocked with the Master Key), but it’s such an enjoyable mechanic that I feel plays off the usually very well thought out level design of Fromsoft games. And since I’m talking about this area already, I’ll mention that I liked the bosses for this area. There are 3 similar sentinels you fight. My first attempt, I got wrecked by the first one on the entrance platform (their attacks have long charge up times, making them hard to dodge on the first attempt). After you beat the first of the three sentinels my first instinct was to jump down where you end up in a 2 on 1 fight. After I died again, I decided I’d try ranged a little and lo and behold, with that extra time on the upper platform, one of the remaining sentinels will jump up to fight you. I really enjoyed having multiple “ways” to fight the boss, which I feel like was something I sorely missed in DS1, especially by the end.

Hey, I’m actually skipping an area finally (Sinner’s Rise, Belfry Luna).

Huntsman’s Copse

The next area I want to mention is Huntsman’s Copse. You can get here directly following Heide’s Tower of Flame, though I’m posting this in the order I did them. This area is neat because it’s another example of split pathing in DS2, something it did a lot more than DS1 (or maybe I just took the different paths more). It’s also one of the first areas where you get to experience some of the side stories in the game. It’s here you meet one half of the treasure hunting duo. Locked in his own trap you meet Creighton the Wanderer who tells you about his companion, Mild Mannered Pate. Creighton claims that Pate is a ruthless killer and you should be careful around him. I didn’t mention it, but we actually already met Pate in The Forest of Fallen Giants where he actually warns you about a trap. It turns out that Pate isn’t a great guy, though, giving us his armor in an apparent attempt to get Creighton to kill us in his place. Regardless how you handle the situation with this duo, you do meet them a couple other times during the game and I thought it was an enjoyable little side-quest, much like your run-ins with Patches.

Undead Purgatory

Following Huntsman’s Copse you come to Undead Purgatory. This area is a bit like a gauntlet that leads to a boss fight and not much else. While this area was pretty straight forward, I wanted to mention a couple things. The first is the enemy design, specifically an ambush you encounter in which a handful of enemies lay in wait for you to run through a path. Now, if you go slowly through this area you’ll actually only encounter a single enemy at a time, making the fight seem pretty trivial. However, if you run through (like the devs intended), you’ll get ambushed by all 4 or 5 at once and it’s almost for sure a death sentence. It was a fun encounter overall, and I thought it was a great way to remind the player to pay attention to their surroundings. One of the signature aspects of FromSoft games (in my opinion) is all the foreshadowing they do in their games, allowing you to see many ambushes, bosses, and unlockable areas far in advance. Beyond the ambush in this area, the boss, while nothing spectacular, was a departure from many of the bosses in Dark Souls. This boss is a chariot being pulled in a circle around a tower. As it runs through the passageway it knocks down both the player and other enemies in the area. After running through and fighting a few skeletons and necromancers, hiding in alcoves as the chariot comes around, you eventually come to a switch that drops a gate on the chariot, leaving only the skeletal horse to fight. Not only was this a cool sequence, it led to a unique boss, with the mechanics of the boss feeling fresh compared to many of the more traditional boss fights where the enemy is human-ish and wielding a traditional weapon of some kind. If I recall correctly, this area was totally optional, but it’s definitely one I remember when thinking back on the game.

Earthen Peak

Earthen Peak is the next area I’ll mention. It’s one of the main places I remember using ranged pretty heavily and it further demonstrated how useful just having a bow can be for drawing out or picking off enemies. This place is dripping (literally) with poison, with many enemies standing in it as well as being covered in it, so naturally if you want to fight them you have to enter the poison or draw them out with your bow. It’s a pretty simple mechanic ultimately, but it added some strategy and planning to the game that I don’t usually feel when playing Souls games. This area also contains one of my biggest frustrations with the Souls games. I don’t plan online (and I know this is a devisive (and usually considered wrong) decision), but I don’t have any interest in being invaded by players, or summoning players for boss fights. I’m content to stay hollow most of the time, and summon NPCs if I’m stuck or happen to be human for some reason. With that said, there’s a windmill in this area, just by a bonfire that’s guarded by a not too out of place knight, and if you hit it with your torch it will stop pumping poison throughout the castle(?), unlocking a few areas, making traversal easier, and most importantly, mostly draining the boss arena of poison. However, in the vanilla game there’s literally nothing hinting at this. You’re expected to read messages from other players, which, guess what, you can’t see when you’re offline -surprised Pikachu-. In the updated version, Scholar of the First Sin, they apparently included an NPC that points at the windmill, however, they’re a summon and unless you’re human you’d never know they were there (and I didn’t know they were until researching for this article). I just think it’s piss poor game design to have to rely on an online community, which hey, servers were offline for ALMOST A YEAR for DS1, 2, and 3, with DS3 servers only coming on in August 2022, with DS1 and DS2 servers still being offline. Also, in defense of playing offline, beyond not enjoying some of the mechanics, I mainly do it because you can get VAC banned for “cheating”, aka modding, DS2 because of it’s multiplayer features. Now, I probably wouldn’t feel the need to mod FromSoft games if they would make even a remotely decent PC port, but they don’t seem interested in doing that, given the hot garbage that is Elden Ring. And honestly, I don’t even need a good port, I just need ultrawide support. If modders can add it in weeks after release of a game, one employee could have added proper support in an iteration.

Alright, alright. Cathartic ranting over, let’s move on to the next area, the Iron Keep.

Iron Keep

The Iron Keep is another example of just how varied DS2 feels compared to DS1, which, yes, you get to a lava filled area after Quelaag, but it still felt like this dark dank underground area now with better lighting ™️, the Iron Keep felt like this fantasy inspired lava world that had a reason for being the way it is, as is explained to you by various NPCs you can converse with. I’m mainly only mentioning this area to touch on two things. The first, is that, I’m really torn about hiding things as basic as respawn points from the player. FromSoft did this in DS1 in Darkroot Basin, and they did it here in DS2, putting a bonfire down a very easy to miss path. Legitimately, the only reason I found it is because my FromSoft bullshit detector was going off thinking how there should be a bonfire by now, so I backtracked and found the path I had missed, but if you weren’t overanalyzing the game like I tend to do, or you were a new Souls player, I bet a lot of people would have missed it altogether. The second thing, is this is the first time we learn a little more about the old ones, and how they parallel key figures from DS1, with the Old Iron King, the boss for this area, posessing the Old King Soul, which is implied to be Gwyn’s.

The Old Souls

There’s only one other area I want to cover, but before I do I’ll just touch on the other 3 Old Souls and their implied links to DS1.

• The Lost Sinner attempted to light the First Flame, much like the Witch of Izalith in DS1 and beyond that, her handcuffs augment pyromancy, and there’s also a Chaos Bug that crawls into her eye in the pre-fight cutscene. Further, in NG+’s, she drops the Old Witch Soul. I’m not going to walk through the implications of the Chaos Bug, but if you’re interested there are quite a few DS2 story explained videos kicking around and they go into the significance of this bug as well as her handcuffs. It made this boss a lot more interesting in hindsight.
• The Rotten possesses the Old Dead One Soul and happens to be made of many bodies of the Undead, which I think is pretty clearly a reference to Gravelord Nito.
• The Duke’s Dear Freja has ties to Seath, and I’ll be honest, I didn’t pick up on this one at all and I still don’t think I fully understand the link, at least not well enough to explain it. However, it is explained in the aforementioned DS2 story videos and they’re going to do a better job if you’re curious about the link.

Story Background and the Final Boss

The last area of the game I want to mention is less of an area, and just a part of the story. The final boss of the game is Nashandra, (former) queen of Drangleic. Through various NPCs and memory levels you play through you learn that Nashandra coveted the power of the giants and convinced the king that the giants were a threat and were going to attack his kingdom. Through this manipulation, the king lead an army to the land of giants where they committed some serious genocide, claiming the giant’s power, which is what Nashandra had been after to begin with. Unfortunately, in a cruel twist of fate, this invasion brought truth to Nashandra’s warning of an impending giant attack. After a peaceful period of rule in Drangleic, the giants launched a retaliatory attack that left the kingdom in the state that we know it today.

And beyond explaining the story more to everyone, I wanted to include this, because, while I’ve added some details I learned from lore videos and research, I got the basic gist of what was happening while playing the game. I never felt this much intrigue or hell, even clarity, playing DS1 (or Elden Ring for that matter).

In an effort to put a bit of a bow on the story part of this post, the final fight is against Nashandra who has been seeking the First Flame since the first war with the giants, and as you’re about to claim the Throne of Want and (potentially) sacrifice yourself to link the First Flame, you’re attacked by Nashandra. The boss fight itself is trivial, especially if you were unintentionally human and happened to summon the NPC outside the boss room.

New Mechanics

Now that we’ve covered some of the areas in the game, as well as some of the bosses and the story, I want to touch on a few mechanics that are new to DS2.

The first two are ones that people are pretty largely against. The first is the new adaptability stat, which now governs your animation speed and more importantly the iframes you get from your dodge. You have to dump levels into this stat to get the same dodge iframes as a light roll in DS1, completely changing the mechanics of not only dodging, but weight management as well. ADP increases your agility stat, and in order to have a DS1 light roll, you need 100 agility, or 20 ADP. Now obviously you can play the game without this, but it’s pretty brutal if you’re used to DS1; you literally have to relearn your entire muscle memory built up over 10s of hours. So I view this as having an almost required base level 20 in ADP, which takes away a lot from other early game stats.

The second of the reviled changes is the death mechanics. You lose maximum health when you die and you can only remove the debuff by using a human effigy, which as far as I’m aware, aren’t farmable while offline. They’re gotten from killing invaders/invading people, and random NPC invasions. As I mentioned, I mostly play as a hollow in DS games, and I ended the game with about 30 human effigies, which wouldn’t have been near enough to maintain my health throughout the game. As a caveat to this, you can get a ring that reduces the maximum health you can lose, but it does feel shitty having to lose a ring slot due to a bullshit death mechanic.

Some of the other changes that aren’t as hated (from what I can tell) are bonfire ascetic’s and enemy perma-death. Enemy perma-death happens after you’ve killed a specific enemy 12-15 times (respawning them via resting or respawning at a bonfire yourself). While this change makes farming harder, I think it’s a good way of reducing the difficulty of an area and also forces players to either move on to a different area, try different strategies for whatever they’re stuck on, or simply git gud. I only had one area where I despawned the enemies, and it was partially due to farming, and partially due to the pretty steep early game difficulty curve (at least it was for me) in Forest of the Fallen Giants. Now paired with the perma-death are the bonfire ascetic, which you can burn at any bonfire to increase enemy strength in an area, prevent perma-death, and even respawn boss mobs. This can be great for farming, or if you wanted to up the difficulty of an area. Both mechanics, I think are pretty well balanced and offer some variety in pacing.

Conclusion

It’s pretty widely accepted that Dark Souls 2 is the worst of the SoulsBornRing games, but after playing through it right after Dark Souls 1 (while simultaneously playing Elden Ring), I gotta say, I really disagree. I will say, I wasn’t (and probably never will be) part of the hype machine surrounding FromSoft games, so a lot of the nostalgia for Dark Souls 1, and the troubled development didn’t impact my feelings towards the game. (Matt McMuscles has a great series called Wha’ Happun where he covers development woes, and the Dark Souls 2 episode explains pretty well what a lot of people were upset about).

But just evaluating things based on enjoyment of the gameplay, design, and story, Dark Souls 2 comes out ahead of 1 for me. Dark Souls 1 is still a great game, but a lot of what I grew tired of by the end of the game, just wasn’t a factor in Dark Souls 2. I felt like the environments were more varied and the gameplay, while slower in most cases, felt great to me. Plus, I was actually able to follow some semblance of a story; the NPCs actually felt like they contributed to my immersion in the world, rather than being fun characters that I encountered throughout. You met many of them multiple times and got to learn their histories, how they came to Drangleic, their motivations, and in many cases brought them back to Majula. And while you did the same thing with Firelink Shrine in DS1, bringing characters back to Majula felt like you were rescuing them in some way, helping to end their journey and assuage their troubles.

There are a lot of examples of this kind of series progress I think I touched on already in this post, but overall, it felt like a step in the right direction, despite some weaker mechanics, like health loss and agility.

So yeah, that’s what I thought of Dark Souls 2. Most of this information was from memory, with a little refresher from the wiki, so I’m sure I missed some key details and got some wrong, but I don’t want this to be a research paper, I want it to be a retrospective a couple weeks after I’ve beaten the game. But I enjoyed my time with Dark Souls 2, and I encourage anyone that’s thinking of playing the series to give it a fair shake. Coming from Dark Souls 1 (or even worse, Elden Ring) the game might not feel great to you, but as you level up (and get the ring that makes you lose less health) you’ll feel more at home and I think you’ll still be able to appreciate the bosses and story, even if it doesn’t end up being better than Dark Souls 1 for you, like it was for me.

PS

There are a couple things I wanted to touch on that I don’t think really fit into the rest of the post. The first is the DLC, and the second is FromSoft.

The DLC

I had read online both before I started playing, and after I beat the game that the DLC is considered the best part of Dark Souls 2, so I set out to experience it for myself.

There are 3 pieces of DLC that were released for DS2, all of which are included in the Scholar of the First Sin edition of the game that I own, and I only played the first one, Crown of the Sunken King. I just did not have a good time with it, to the point that I didn’t want to play the rest of the (interconnected) DLC.

Crown of the Sunken king involves a lot of hint-less puzzle solving while being tormented by spectres you can’t attack, and ranged enemies that you couldn’t kill without your own ranged weapon. It felt very far removed from what the rest of the game was, and at first I thought it might have just been Souls burnout on my part, but after putting a few hours into DS3 I realized that it’s just this DLC that I didn’t enjoy.

From the off the DLC put a bad taste in my mouth. You have to slog through areas you’ve already been to to get to these special bonfires that transport you to a different realm, three fires in total, each taking you to a different DLC. While you can access this DLC as you play through the game, you need special items to unlock each of them found in game. While I don’t know how accessible the 2nd and 3rd DLC items are, the first one is definitely off the beaten path, and I don’t think I’d have been able to get the item (due to the level of the enemies) had I been there while I was already in the area.

So once you’ve gotten you super secret special item and you’ve ran through an entire level you’ve already beaten (which, by the way, for the first DLC requires you fight through the area unless you use speedrun strats), you get to an admittedly cool area. Similar to the opening of the game, you arrive and are presented with a beautiful overview of the Sunken City from above. This gave me high hopes for the area after the frustration of getting there, I thought the people on the internet had to be right; they weren’t.

I already mentioned some of my annoyances with the area (puzzles, un-attackable enemies), but even after you overcome those things, the area is very maze-like with lots of dead ends and mostly pointless areas that don’t progress you through. Like seriously, I was getting so annoyed playing through this that even after looking up a walkthrough for the area, I almost stopped playing before getting to the first boss of the area. But I persevered, fighting enemies that blocked your path and forced you to spend a few minutes hitting them and running away, or simply attacking them outright and hoping your equipment didn’t decay. I powered through an entire section with nothing but platforming and enemies that chase you; platforming being a staple of the souls series and being beautifully implemented. If it wasn’t clear, that’s heavy, heavy sarcasm. Platforming in Souls games has been absolutely abysmal, only getting better (so far) in Elden Ring. And after playing through all of my favorite things, I’m given a boss which just feels unfair. Elana, Squalid Queen’s boss fight went okay for the first part of my attempt, but quickly took a turn towards frustration as she started summoning mobs making me dodge 1-3 enemies on top of her own attacks, which even at lvl 150+ could one-hit me in some cases. I attempted this fight solo 2 or 3 times before deciding I would pop a human effigy and summon the NPC by the door. While this is ultimately how I won the fight, it was far from fun, and I didn’t get any of the satisfaction of learning boss patterns and overcoming a challenge, like most of the Souls bosses give you.

After beating Elana, you’re given multiple summons and thrust pretty much immediately into the next DLC boss. A dragon, that I think is the single most boring boss fight in a Souls game so far. I will admit that a lot of this was probably due to having multiple summons, but I don’t see it getting much better solo. The attacks were insanely telegraphed and mindlessly easy to dodge, and my attacks did next to no damage. I honestly only remember it because of how bad it was.

So yeah, I haven’t played Dark Souls 2 since, and I don’t know if I’ll come back to attempt the other DLC.

FromSoft

Being a PC player of FromSoft games is so, so frustrating. Even before I started playing on an Ultrawide, playing Dark Souls 1 was a pretty miserable experience. Like seriously, the game is locked at 30 FPS. Now, this was fixed in the remastered version, but I should have never needed to use a 3rd party program to be able to run a game released in 2012 (AND 2016 FOR THE PREPARE TO DIE EDITION) at 60FPS. Like seriously, how do you come out with a game of the year style edition of your game in 2016 and think 30FPS is okay?

And beyond the framerate, the ultrawide issues in each game just suck and they can all get you banned, save DS1. Thankfully, for the next game I’m playing, DS3, it should only get me banned in-game, and not VAC banned, but holy shit. Why do I have to mod my game to get ultrawide support, and why the fuck are you banning people for modding in resolution/aspect ratio support. Dark Souls multiplayer isn’t competitive, it’s not something with a ranked leaderboard or in-game tournaments. Banning people for graphical mods is just asinine.

I can forgive not having ultrawide support, even in 2022, but man, it just feels shitty being a paying customer and getting such a subpar product compared to other games on the market.

Also, not part of a Dark Souls 2 rant, but there’s a community mod allowing full coop in Elden Ring. It uses the netcode from the existing summoning system, but why in the hell is this not just a game mode???

Alright. I’ve ranted a lot in this post. That’s all I have to say about Dark Souls 2 and FromSoft until my next post (either Elden Ring or DS3). For anyone that read this far, thanks for coming on this journey with me. If you don’t like DS2, I hope this post brought up some new points, and for anyone that likes it, I’m happy to be joining your minority community.

Thanks for reading,

- Zack, AlaskanBeard