South Park - The Stick of Truth: It's the show in playable format!

My Mom is a pretty interesting person. Masters graduate, devout catholic, supportive of her children, and generous to friends and family to a fault. She's pretty awesome but she and I stand on opposite sides on a lot of things. I listen to metal, she likes show tunes. I like RPGS, she prefers casual games. I love tex-mex, and she doesn't (and is wrong). But one thing that one thing that we share without question is our complete love of the show South Park.

Now, South Park has never really had a good game iteration in its history, so I was pretty excited to hear that Matt Stone and Trey Parker were going to be directly involved. But as is the curse of video game development, there were delays, glitchy problems, and generally iffy reviews. But a lot of media sources that I tend to frequent were telling me that if I am a fan of the show, I will be a fan of the game. With concerns of game length, I held off on buying it, waiting for it drop down in price. I happened to be near a redbox and gave it a look, and 360 copy was available. So I had to dust off the old girl and fire her up to play.....

SOUTH PARK: THE STICK OF TRUTH

The story opens up with an animated vignette (not unlike their Heavy Metal spoof) describing a war between the human forces and drow elves, and how thanks to the efforts of the "Grand Wizard" (Cartman) they have laid claim to the mighty "Stick of Truth" and whoever has possession of it's power can shape the universe as they see fit.

You and your family have just moved into South Park. You are somewhat of a quiet child, and although your parents are loving, they seem as if the move here is being used to escape something. After creating the new you, your parents send you out to go make some friends. Quickly stepping outside  (or being thrown out by your father if you take too long like I did), you will run into your new neighbor Butters. He welcomes you to town and invites you to play with them and takes you to the "Kingdom of Kupa Keep" (yes, the KKK), to meet the Grand Wizard King, Cartman. To prove your loyalty you become embroiled in the war between the Humans and Elves over the Stick of Truth.

Unassuming but All-Powerful, the bearer of the Stick of Truth holds the power to
shape the Universe as one see's fit...... Or really just has a stick and bragging rights.

So right out of the gate, I have to say that the visual style is absolutely spot on. It literally is an exact representation of the show. When you move everyone hops around in place with slight motions of the arm, and very little leg movement. The paper cutout style of art/flash animation is faithfully recreated, but now we actually have a layout to the town of South Park which allows you to see where everyone lives in proximity to each other and how small this little town really is.

It also allows you to fly around pretty quickly too. There is a fast travel system in place for the exceptionally lazy which basically allows you to bum around in Timmy's wheelchair, but I found myself only using this when it took me to a quest destination or the other side of the map completely. I guess it falls to what you are more impatient with: waiting for a load time to put you in place somewhere or the time it takes to actually traverse the world map.

The overall map is not huge, so expect a lot of back and forth.

The game wastes no time letting you know that you are in this universe because as soon as you finish punching in your name, Cartman deems your name "Douchebag" and everyone else refers to you as such regardless of what you put in for yourself. In typical Parker/Stone fashion the intent is to offend fast and often. So expect to hear the word Fuck about as often as you read it in this blog (actually, probably a lot more).

After you have created and named your character you will get to pick your job class between Fighter, Mage, Thief, and Jew. As you scroll through the options you will of course be getting color commentary from Cartman heckling you for whatever it is you are thinking about (and naturally picking Jew gives you the worst of it). These basically give you your specialized abilities for the game, otherwise the customization between the 4 job classes is generally the same. For the sake of my play through I just went fighter because I was Redboxing my game and wanted to tear through it.

"White Fighter huh? Don't see many of those all to often." - Eric Cartman

The game plays an interesting blend of homage to the show while still producing a new narrative in their style of humor. Many of the characters you meet and the places you will go all have some bit of dialog or story that throws back to something you might have seen from an episode. But as you play through the game there will be lots of subtle jabs (and a lot of the time not so subtle jabs) at various things in the game industry or other titles outright.

For example, I would say one of the games that is most heavily influenced as I played along would have to be Skyrim. Much of the score of the game mimics the boisterous Nordic sounding theme of Skyrim in its own South Parkian way, and there are a handful of times where your character is referred to as the Dragonborn. There are also handful of songs that don't directly rip off but sound very similar to the Skyrim world maps and various situational themes would occur as I played through.

Opening a characters closet treats you to a compilation of call backs to that characters
various show shenanigans. The only one you can't open is Stan's, and you know why that is.

But there are also jabs at just things people take for granted in games. For example: anything you can open is usually marked with a yellow handle and for the most part opening things rewards you with some crappy item (with humorous flavor text), things you can sell, or at best things you can use to customize your character. But a lot of times you will just be invading someones house, and the game will let you know are being a creep. I have walked in on a lady standing in the nude followed by a shriek and a door slam, a guy jacking it on his couch before he slammed the door on me, and two Canadians just going at it on their bed (they yelled at me, but it didn't stop them).

There is also a section where you pick up audio logs, and as you pick them up they get progressively more angry at the fact that audio logs are always pointless, and why do people take the time to record them when they could be escaping? They also make a number of other cracks at other games too, so it's not just a rehashing of the jokes from the show. A good deal of them were pretty funny and much like watching the show I was pretty much glued to the script to see what they were going to say next.

Naturally though, the humor coming from the minds of South Park is guaranteed to push boundaries and offend some people. Sure enough, that is exactly what happened as both Europe and Australia censored specific parts of the game. As Parker and Stone are very much against censorship, the EU and AU versions of the game make sure to voice their displeasure about the overreaching censoring government.

By game end you will be playing on both sides of the war, so all of the major kid characters will be on your team at some point. As the story progresses the villains will change, but I hesitate to call this a deep game. It's overall playtime can be finished in about 10 hours if you make a habit of skipping the side quests. I gave them a relatively fair amount of attention and I managed to tear through the game in about 15 or so hours, but I was making the push to finish it so I could be done with it in a 1 day check out. It took me two.

The game itself plays in the same vein of JRPG that Mario Superstars or Paper Mario falls into, where the team basically consists of yourself and one of the other major characters. When in combat you get a wheel of options from your basic melee and ranged attacks, special abilities, "magic" (basically ripping ass on people), and other options. When you go to attack you are given indications or quick time events to maximize the damage potential, usually a little flash for you to hit a button for your critical, unless promoted by another QTE. This also applies to defense as well as you will have a quick indicator for a block, and if you block the whole combo you will have a chance for small retaliation damage.

Along the map, you will find open flames you can "Dragon Shout" at (read: Fart)
which will blow open  new paths, or take out enemies without having to fight them.

But it does do something interesting with the battle system. While each character gets a turn, there is sort of a prep turn that you get prior to your attack. When you or your partner's turn comes up, you have the option to use a healing/buffing item or special ability, and then if you haven't made an offensive attack yet, you are then able to do so. I found this actually to be pretty cool, once I realized it. If you get speed potions (coffee) it basically allows you an extra turn right at the start of fight. So you can get a free debuff or two attacks.

And MAN, debuffs are important in this game. In addition to enemy hit points, there is also an armor level that soaks a portion of the damage you do, and if they are wearing some kind of armor or shield, that needs to be dealt with as well in order to really start putting the hurt on people. There was a specific boss fight in the middle of the game where you are fighting against Al Gore and some members of the secret service where the fight starts off pretty even, but when the secret service comes out the defensive buffs they get are just retarded. The fight took me close to 10 attempts before I managed to stumble on the right set of debuffs to weaken them down. So don't ignore debuffing your foes.

With the exception of boss fights, you can also pull up a series of summoned characters to use to basically insta-kill all the enemies on the screen. You can only use each of them once per day, and only if you completed the respective side quests for that character. Jesus is pretty easy to get as he just involves talking Father Maxie twice and then finding Jesus in the Church. Getting Mr. Tuong Lu Kim from City Wok (one of my favorite characters) involves clearing out a small tower, and Mr. Hankey was probably the hardest since you had to scour the South Park sewers for his 3 children. If a fight is too hard, use these because saving them for a bigger fight tends to render them useless.

Because the game itself is so short, it has an incredibly low level cap, once you hit level 15 you have pretty much maxed out your character. You won't be able to learn everything but that actually does allow you a degree of customization depending on what type of character you were building. I actually went with a pretty safe selection of stats during the course of the game, and I'm curious to learn how that might change things if I had picked different job classes.

Sometimes summon's that attack one person will still scare of the others.

There are also a pretty good degree of side missions and collectibles throughout the game as well as some pretty raunchy and ridiculous achievements. But more than anything it's a fun ripple for a fan of the South Park universe who really wants to know more about it. As someone who has followed the show for a long time it was nice to travel all round the town and revisit old locations, see nods to things all the way back in season one, and see nearly every character to grace the series get a small spot in the sun as you play.

Can it carry for multiple play thoughs? That I am not so sure about. Like any good episode of any show, the jokes lose a lot of their steam once you already know the punch lines and I would image that would be much of the same case here. The story allows you to make some different decisions as you play through and I think that would affect the story somewhat but overall I don't think that they would have a massive impact to the game. I think because of the game's relative shortness you could probably get through two play throughs with relative ease but after that it will probably lose steam.

Kyle's most powerful move is practically game breaking. Even if you mess up
the quick time event with it, it still does enough damage to beat everyone.

If you are a fan of JRPG style games, you will probably find this game to be an entertaining but somewhat lacking experience. If you are a fan of South Park in general, it does everything it needs to satisfy your needs as a fan of the franchise. Honestly the only people I would think of who wouldn't like this game are people who are easily offended by the show, but then again, I highly doubt those people would ever pick this game up in the first place.

There isn't a lot this game brings to the table, but what it does it does well. The gameplay is fun, the music is fitting for the theme, the humor and design are spot on. Sure the storyline isn't exactly groundbreaking, but for telling a South Park it does exactly what its supposed to. Yeah there are a handful of glitching issues and its really short, but thats good for a game carried on humor. It means it doesn't overstay its welcome.

I had a lot of fun with this game, and if I had more time with it I would probably still be playing it. I am still pretty sketchy about that 60$ price tag. I've certainly payed more for games with shorter campaigns but something about the price tag still sticks in my craw. I personally would wait for a 20 or 30$ price point but make no mistake about it, after 17 years of the series, we finally have a good South Park game.

How do I go to Canada and no run across Scott the Dick?
For shame South Park, I was let down.

Infamous: Second Son (PS4): Short but Sweet

So if you've read in the subtext of this blog, you'll note that I have some pretty positive feelings towards the Infamous series. Just a good set of sandbox games that are well built, fun to play, and have a decent story. Neither of them ever really got a full write up on this blog.  Now, I was pretty excited about the idea of a new Infamous on my shiny new PS4, but I wasn't crazy about the look of the main character and the story seemed all but wrapped up with nowhere to go. But why stop a good thing right? So with the first major PS4 exclusive I've been waiting on, lets knuckle down with...

INFAMOUS: SECOND SON (PS4)

It's been 7 years since the incident in New Marais back in Infamous 2, where Cole MacGrath fought back the Beast and used the Ray Field Inhibitor to kill the Beast, cure the plague sweeping the nation, and sacrifice himself and everyone carrying the conduit gene. Cole was given a hero's viking funeral and all seemed to be restored to order.

Now the conduit gene begins to resurface, and activated conduits are heralded as Bio-Terrorists and being rounded up and arrested by the DUP (Department of Unified Protection). The DUP is run by Brooke Augustine, a conduit with the power to control concrete at her whim, and has used said power to forcefully detain other conduits. 

Delsin Rowe is an Akomish Native American, graffiti artist, and a small town delinquent. While tagging a billboard to harass his brother Reggie (the local sheriff) and his subsequent arrest by his brother, the DUP military convoy carrying a number of conduits crashes in front of them. While Reggie immediately goes into police mode and tries to pursue two of the escapees, Delsin finds a fallen conduit named Hank in the wreckage and tries to help him out, but by grabbing his hand the contact from an activated conduit activates his own conduit gene and awakes Delsin's latent abilities, allowing Delsin to copy the ability to absorb and use smoke like powers.

Reggie is obviously the straightman and moral compass to Delsin's "tude".
He's a bit of a D-bag but his heart is generally in the right place.

In a panic, Delsin pursues Hank try to get himself fixed, but they are stopped and confronted by Augustine. She encases Hank in concrete and confronts Delsin about what he had heard, stabbing through his leg bones with spears of concrete. Delsin blacks out from the pain, and comes to to realize Augustine tortured many of the Akomish tribe, leaving them with painful and terminal concrete shards in their bones. After a brief confrontation with his brother, Delsin realizes the only way to fix this is get Augustine (or her power) and bring her back.

I was somewhat curious if this game was going to follow along with the story line from the previous Infamous titles or not because it seemed like the story to the previous titles pretty much had a definitive ending, which is something you don't really see anymore these days. While it does find ways to link the stories together, Delsin's story really should be taken by its own merits since there is a significant portion of timeline between Cole's death and the events that start the Second Son story.

There is sort of a dystopian feel to the overall story and setting. It takes place
farther in the future so it makes sense, but I don't know if I care for it.

Infamous has always been a beacon of solidly built and fluid control in gaming, and for the most part I would say that remains consistent here. There are no wasted buttons for the most part, flying around town is easy, combat is fast and fun. Its pretty much everything that I would like in a sandbox title. If I had to nag on something, I would say that its climbing controls feel a bit more sticky this time around. Infamous 1 you could fly around and climb with relative ease, but you were occasionally only stopped by a chain link fence. Infamous 2 added the addition of the Ice Launch which would rocket you up the building making things even easier.

And to be fair Infamous: Second Son has something similar for rocketing up buildings depending on your powers, but if there are moments that require precision climbing or a ledge that might just be out of reach you will be falling to the old mash the jump standby to keep springing off the wall, and for whatever reason Delsin never seems to grab the section that I would like him to or I get caught in this loop of kicking off the same area of wall trying to get to the ledge I'm aiming for like 40 button presses. Its annoying, but not a common problem through game play to make it a jarring flaw.

Climbing is not as tight as before, but still fast and functional.

The powers "bases" seem to be a bit more abstract this time around. Cole had the lighting which was a good base and fun to use, and the addition of fire and ice powers made sense in a logical standpoint. But Delsin didn't get something so cut and dry. After coming into contact with Hank, he absorbs the ability to manipulate smoke. Which is cool in concept, for example one of the fast ways to scale a building with smoke is to find a vent near the bottom and pass through that in smoke form, allowing you to rocket up the building a fire out the top like a cannon.

Although, with smoke a few liberties are taken as a good portion of his attacks could have easily been "fire" instead and had the same kinda effect. But since that was done with Nyx in Infamous 2 I suppose they didn't want to copy it straight off. There is a cool ability that nearly breaks the game in his smoke grenade. It does non-lethal damage but stuns that whole area for a few seconds. So instead of engaging a firefight you can smoke the area, charge in and then execute or subdue the enemies in a single pass. It may not get all of them but you can tear through the fodder with ease.

In addition to the smoke abilities, as you progress through the game you will also be able to harness the abilities of Neon and Video, which each have their own cool little tricks to it. A number of the main differences between them are more or less how you get around. Neon is weaker than smoke but it makes you move super fast and also functions as your snipe ability, and the grenade puts enemies in a stasis so you can pick your shot.

Video is more of a stealth options where you can leave an after image for the enemies to shoot at while you sneak behind them and pin them down with digital swords. They all have their varied strengths so you can opt to level them as you please if you put in the work to find the blast shards to level them all. There are melee attacks too with a chain, but they cease to be useful pretty much after the first few encounters. While they do enough to play differently, I felt some wider variance to the abilities might have been nice.

The neon effects in this game are really fucking cool.

Like the previous Infamous titles, the story is also followed by a moral choice system. As you travel around the city, there are various little "to-do's" you can do to affect your alignment. You can fly around the city and stop drug deals from going down or released captured suspects for a moral boost, or you can just attack random street musicians or protesters descend into infamy.

But as you play through the game, there a handful of major story events where you have to make a moral decision, this will have a stronger affect on your alignment and it alters how the story conversations play out giving it either a more feel good or darker tone. Replaying the opening mission and then choosing different options showed me that the story can take two incredibly different vibes depending on how you chose, which is great because this means multiple play throughs.

What bugs me about it though is in the weeks up to the games release there were news rumblings on sites like Kotaku, Destructoid, or QJ saying that Sucker Punch Games "wanted you to really think about the decisions you made". Guess what, you failed.  Each decisions that you make its literally sugar coated with GOOD and EVIL dressings. Aside from having bright blue and red text, the decisions are like "Turn yourself in" or "Sell out your tribe."  Or when you are at points are about to get a new power, the options are "Redeem" or "Corrupt".

Along the way you will meet other conduits for abilities, and they play
the main factors for the game's moral choice system.

I love the concept of a moral choice system, but so far I don't think I have ever played a single game that has ever gotten the system actually right. There are two major problems for this is: One, you are rewarded for going all one direction or the other. If you make one good or bad decisions, you better be prepared to make all of them go that way because if you don't you are going to be stuck with middling abilities that are lack luster while all the real powerful gear or abilities are locked away because you tried to make your choices naturally. If someone chooses to play neutral why not just make their current abilities stronger, just having less of them?

Two, there is no fucking grey area with the decisions. Like I said a paragraph ago, there is no thought process required in making these decisions. For example, say in a game like this an elderly woman falls down in the street. The moral choices in a game like this would be something like "Stop all traffic and then help them up, carry them the hospital and cover the medical expenses and mow her lawn while she recovers" or "Strangle her brand new puppy to death in front of her while pissing in the face crying grandchild before walking away to back her car over her." Couldn't I just walk away? Why can't there be a middle ground, why is always the worst of two extremes? Or at the very least make the two options that you have viable but difficult for different reasons.

I guess you have to look like a smug mother fucker for a super move.
Because when you hit the ground you ruin a lot of people's days.

If you look at something like TellTale games The Walking Dead that is a game that at least gives you some difficult decisions to make that have some serious impacts on the game at large, and gives you varied degrees of middle ground in each case. It likes to put you in situations where you are basically fucked either way you pick so you have to deal with consequences regardless, and that never seems to be the case in moral choice games like these. Mass Effect has gotten close but again, its better to be all paragon or renegade than middle ground. Since we are getting to the point where games are taking up 50 gigs of space, I really want to see some serious thought coming in on future moral choices.

The game is visually stunning. I'm never one to throw a hissy fit when my game isn't constantly running at 60 frames a second, and the only time I every actually complain about it is when it gets as bad as Mugen Souls got. To the point where game play is so choppy it makes it almost unplayable. For the most part all of the animations and transitions are smooth, and the game never slows down. This is impressive with all the smoke and neon effects as you are constantly absorbing abilities and firing off beams and explosions.

When looking over the visualscape (which I think is a word I just made up), I did have concern that things were going to be dark and gritty since that appears to be the trend in games. There was also a concern that because the game was set in Seattle, I was afraid we'd get just a generic city setting and a constantly rainy atmosphere. To be fair, there is a fair amount of that, but when you are skimming the rooftops you will also be treated to beautiful sunsets, a glimmering coast line, and colorful neon lights around the city.

You can often find yourself just looking around at things. The game is stunning.

I think graphically the only thing that I am kind offset by is the actual character models. The Infamous games are actually pretty notorious for this in the fact that the characters somehow manage to look incredibly lifelike or cartoony at the exact same time. It is very strange to me and I can never seem to put my finger on why it is it just feels so... off. This game was mo-capped like Beyond: Two Souls was, but has a very different look. This was compounded by fact that I was already a little sketchy about Delsin's overall look. The beanie, the jean jacket it, the skinny jeans. Bleh.. that is so not my look, I don't care how punk rock he is supposed to be..

But then he spoke in a very familiar voice, and I think its official: I'm totally gay for Troy Baker. This guy's voice is in everything. Kanji from Persona 4, Joel from The Last of Us, Vincent in Catherine, Booker in Bioshock Infinite, Male voice 1 in Saints Row, even in roles I didn't much care for him in (James in Silent Hill 2), Baker just continues to knock it out of the park in every role he portrays in every video game he is in, and Infamous: Second Son is no exception. Inside of two or three cutscenes I went from "Delsin is a douchebag punk" to "Delsin is the coolest guy ever". Yeah, perhaps that is biased journalism but I don't care. Troy can have the lead role in every video game for the rest of ever for all I care.

I think we are reaching a point where video game motion capture is becoming a legitimate
form of acting. Like Onimusha before, characters are modeled after the actors portraying them.

I suppose the biggest problem in this game, is the one that everyone has already bandied about. The game is short. REALLY short. Like can beat in a 24 hour span kinda short. I received the game later on a Tuesday and by Wednesday evening I was pretty much already done with the story. Sure there were a handful of additional missions and collectibles to do but for the most part I had completed Infamous: Second Son. I could go back and play it again making the other decisions but essentially for a single play though I didn't feel the length a 60$ game should be. There is some additional content like the paper trail DLC missions but I don't know if that is going to grab me the way I would have liked it to. You know what this game needs? An online mode. CTF or deathmatch with conduit abilities on a massive map? Sign me up.

Here's the deal: Infamous: Second Son is one damn good game. They have the sandbox formula pretty much down pat and if they keep creating content for this series than all the better. They teased some very cool ability ideas that I would have loved to see put into practice here, but as it stands right now, we get a very short but fulling experience. This somewhat feels like a game that was rushed out a bit to try to start moving Playstation 4 units and to that end it is succeeding. But you are really still paying 60 bucks for a 5-8 hour experience. A really good experience mind you, just a really short one too. If that price tag for that length is too hefty, I wouldn't blame you for holding off on this one.

I really need to find a better name for this blog.

I haven't raged at a game in fucking months. 

Dark Souls II: A firm spanking to remind me how naughty I've been.

If you know me in any capacity, you know that I have a raging gamer boner for the Souls series. I originally quit on but picked back up Demon's Souls and finally got me into a place where I understood the nuance and the challenge, and dumped a sick number of hours into it. Then Dark Souls came out and put me right back into place. It opened the world up and gave me multiple different possibilities. It was nearly perfect, and the fact that I have like 5 characters and close to 300 hours of game play time logged shows how strong of a game is was. But now, I prepare to die..... Again.

DARK SOULS II

We are still set in the same world of Dark Souls as the previous title, and the accursed Darksign is still affecting people, cursing them to become undead, gradually losing their humanity and memory until they become a hollow. A crazed, broken, and empty undead being.

You are a wandering undead, following was seems to be an irresistible yet silent call to the land of Dranglaec. Another fallen society that seems to be brimming with available souls. Upon arriving you stumble upon a house belonging to 3 elderly fire keepers and their handmaiden. You are given an human effigy to restore your human self, and then granted passage into the kingdom of Dranglaec to try to find the king of this realm and hopefully a way to free yourself of the darksign curse.

Apparently the gateway to Dranglaec is to fling yourself in a whirlpool of death.
..... Seems Legit.

Like the previously Souls games, this is one of those games that doesn't really spoon feed you store and exposition. You are given a base premise, and then sent out into the world to get you ass kicked. But if you are willing to pay attention to the NPCs, each of them have their own little nuances and back stories that all weave into the overall narrative if you are looking to learn it.

I've yet to solve everything so it's early for me to have any opinions of the overarching narrative but I will have to say the opening cutscene was incredibly impressive from a visual standpoint. There is then another cutscene with the firekeeper that prologues you before you actually get to create your character. It ran a bit longer than I felt it should, and to longtime fans of the series they might find this off putting. Thankfully, pressing start allows you to skip any cutscene which after the first play through I am sure everyone is doing. This also appears to be the only real cutscene outside of prior to a boss fight, so I don't knock that hard against it.

Takes a bit too much prattle to get to the Character creator this time around.
Shaddap ya hold hag, I've got about 13 billion deaths to get to. 

The characters in this one do see a tad less... Memorable, I guess. But I think I base that around the fact on two characters: Sigmeyer the onion knight, who you can't miss from his appearance alone. And Soltaire because what sun-bro doesn't want to engage in jolly cooperation? There are a number of characters each with their own story quests to fulfill, but I am fairly certain I went through the game without completing any of them simple because I haven't explored the maps yet.

There have been a number of changes to Dark Souls 2 and a number of things remain the same. The character creator, for example, has gone through a dramatic change in that its actually somehow more shit than the previous titles. That's pretty impressive considering the fact that the character creation in all three of these games eats a bag of used dildos. Before the sliders and options did pretty much nothing to change the character from average to hideous, but now I have 5-20 seconds of lag before I get to even preview what it is I changed.

Honestly just pick your gender and go. The creator is just a simple reminder that no
 matter how hard you work, and how much effort you put in you will NEVER be pretty.

Its a minor complaint I suppose, but seriously, has anyone at From Software every played a Saints Row game? Not only are the changes in that create-a-character instantaneous, but the number of options are robust, ridiculous, and most importantly decent looking.  I would have appreciated that option here, but I suppose it doesn't matter since you will usually be covered in armor anyways. Even better, use something like what that Black Desert MMO is gonna use.

Souls are still the end all be all in this game. Kill enemies to get souls, kill bosses to get souls, find souls on the ground, and in chests as well. They still function as your experience to level up, and still function as the currency at the shops. Still lose em when you get killed, and they are still gone for good if you get killed again before you can pick them back up. You only can level up in one place this time around, but it feels like leveling up is faster in this game, so it never hurts to warp home to level at each bonfire and then warp back.

The Emerald Herald is Dark Souls 2's "Lady In Black". She is required to level
up and boost the number of Estus use you have, so don't flippin' kill her.

The combat system hasn't really changed all that much either, it uses the tried and true shoulder button combat any souls fan will be familiar with at this point. They did make a small change to where instead of using the run button to jump, it uses L3 instead. This did not feel smooth or intuitive to me so I changed that button back to the dash as quickly as I could. Because there is nothing more infuriating in any game than dying in the tutorial. Even in Dark Souls.

They did make some changes to how the combat works though. For example, the your equipment load is still a factor. When you start to load up on your armor it will keep a running percentage of how heavy your gear is in comparison to how much gear you can feasibly carry. The more gear you add the better your defense will be but the harder it will be to move. In the both Dark Souls and Demon's Souls you really wanted to pay attention to your numbers, because for each 25% of your weight total you added, the more it would slow you down, and the less effective your dodge roll would become.

You can tank up a bit and still be able to dodge roll with relative speed,
so unless the build stops you, bring a heavier set for hairier moments.

In Dark Souls II however, they have become a bit more lenient with the weight. Now, unless you add like 120% of your weight capacity, your movement for the most part will not be hampered. You can still run at nearly top speed and still jump with ease. If you exceed 70% you will get the lovable "fat roll" (which if you are wearing that much, you should be tanking hits with a shield anyways). If you are below 70, you will be able to roll like normal, but the speed of the roll and the distance you move is affected by how close you are. So one who is at 68.7% couldn't roll as far as someone at 43%, who couldn't roll as far as someone at 31% and so on.

So my original logic is like "Oh great, I can tank better and still get a dodge roll." Yeah not so much. The dodge roll in previous game gave a you a pretty generous amount of invulnerability when dodge rolling away from an attack. You have to be incredibly more precise when trying to roll away in this one. If you jump much too early you are still going to take a big chunk of damage and to be honest it was very hard to adjust to. So much to the point that after about 20 something levels into my mage I tried to start over with a soldier who could tank better. Supposedly the amount of invincibility you get is proportional to your adaptability stat, but I haven't confirmed it yet.

I was going to put one of my videos here, but frankly I'm awful and lazy. So here is one of those
infuriating asshats who beat the game in less than hour and half. (My best is 60+ hours)

And it wouldn't be a Souls game if it didn't remind you right out of the gate that this game is going to kick your ass, and Dark Souls II is no exception. People familiar with the previous titles no doubt have learned the easy way to dispatch enemies is to raise your shield and move straight at them and let the lock on feature swing you around to the back when then miss. That doesn't happen here. The AI this time around is smart enough to know to keep its back away from you for the most part, and their attack animations have less delay so while its still possible to get behind them, its not as easy.

They also hamper you with your starting gear. As per the usual Souls games, the character class you start with basically just gives you your starting stats and a handful of cheap gear to get you out the door. The one constant was that everyone had a shield. That is not the case here, half of the classes only will get a weapon, and that little change is all it took to throw my entire system out of whack. That first run is always a killer because you may have an idea what kind of build you want, but you never really know what you need until you find whats available.

Going Deprived gives you a nice flat base to work with stat wise, but you get
NOTHING to start with. Last game you at least got a club. Not this time.

Being hollow doesn't protect you either. I would spend a good portion of my Dark Souls experience hollow just so I wouldn't be invaded by other players and constantly losing my progress. That doesn't save you now, you can be invaded at any given point, human or hollow. Worse yet, there are certain area's of the game that force you to be teleported as a phantom for someone else to kill you. Thankfully, that doesn't affect YOUR progress and if you die you are dropped where you were taken. Just remember if you were fending off monsters because they will be waiting for you.

While I am on that point, you can't really grind like you used to either because after so many stops a bonfire after a certain point enemies wills top respawning if you kill them too many times, which essentially puts a level cap on that area. You can use something called a Bonfire Atheistic and it will allow the enemies to respawn, but this is a the same as adding new game+ to a certain area, so while the rewards are better, the difficulty also increases. Its just easier to be a SunBro and farm boss fights but keep in mind the number of souls you tally overall overtime does affect your ability to get help.

With smarter and faster enemies this time around, there is no shame
in calling for back up. I certainly did..... A lot.

You also are not able to neck down Estus like Sunny D anymore either. You are given only one to start off with and have disposable healing items to keep you afloat until you can strengthen your Estus potion, and it heals over time and not immediately, so you can't just heal up and jump back into the fray, you actually have to plan around your healing a bit. This leads to some quickly panicked strategizing against player opponents or difficult boss fights.

There are a few other changes I'm not really crazy about either. The weapon crafting for example, seems incredibly dumbed down in this installment. In both Demon's and Dark you always wanted to be frugal with hoarding your ores. Each ore affected some different type of element, and it was a good idea to hang onto them until you knew exactly what kind of weapon you were looking to build. It was more complicated in Demon's and was simplified but still robust in Dark. Dark Souls 2 basically oversimplifies all of it.

All basic weapons upgrade on one type of ore varied on size, rare weapons require a twinkling ore, and monster weapons use petrified dragon bones. All elemental stones can infuse a weapon with that property, and only needs to be used once to give it said enchantment. So instead of hoarding up your ore to figure out how to construct that perfect weapon, there really is no reason not to try to bolster up any regular gear you are using up to level 6 since that can be done with ease. It bothered me a little because it took out any need to know who dropped what, or planning ahead to prepare for a future crafting (almost every one of my Dark Souls builds plans around getting a Furysword, which requires saving your ore till about half way through the game).

Before I would take on every boss fight on my own first just to see if I could win.
After 2 bosses I just said fuck it and summoned help any time I had the chance.

Another thing I didn't care for is the map this time around isn't as circular as it was in Dark Souls. Before as you walked around there we paths you can unlock to provide shortcuts from area to area, and ultimately if you continued to follow a certain path, you would eventually loop yourself back around to where you started. It gave this good feeling of expanse. I wouldn't exactly say that Dark Souls 2 is linear, but it doesn't leave me with this greater sense that the world is connected.

Dark Souls 2 instead basically gives you the bonfire fast travel system you had to earn Dark Souls right from the get go. And while there are a handful of shortcuts the main town you start in basically just runs you in 4 opposite directions. So that's a little bit of a disappointment. It also can occasionally hamper the flow of the game because sometimes you will think you've hit a dead end and you will find yourself wondering where to go next. I found myself stuck a few times, but never for very long. It was usually just a matter of teleporting back to base to level up and then getting started down a different road instead of finishing on that I had started.

Seriously From Software? I'm getting real sick of trying to climb down
rickety wooden scaffolds in completely dark conditions. Knock if off.

And I suppose, the biggest complaint that I have overall is the game doesn't seem as well designed as its predecessors. I'm not talking about the the apparent decrease in visual quality the game has had (something I didn't even notice), but that rooms don't appear to be though out to be challenging. The are thought out to be frustrating. There have been a number of times I would walk into a situation where the room was designed to kill me immediately. The attempts to respond were minimal, and the enemies would have some kind of cheap guard passing or stun locking attack.

This is frustrating and disappointing really, because Dark Souls was so perfectly thought out. It just in some way feels like they couldn't think of a way to ramp up the difficulty and make it fair, so they just made things a bit more unfair and called it a day. Granted, I managed to get through the game once with little issue, but there are some balancing issues that I think need to be taken care of in future patches. But even still, patches can's fix up boss fights that are frustrating by design. There is a particular boss fight where you fight 3 things at once and if you aren't geared up to tank hits, you might be making a good number of attempts at beating it at nearly any level.

Lastly, and this is more of a personal gripe, but I've hit a bit of a dead zone since the initial release of the game, where either people have stopped playing or out leveled me completely. Because on the different builds I am doing I can't find any summon help to help me with bosses, nor will anyone teleport me from my sign. It sucks because I could really use the help for certain sections and I only have so many effigy's to maintain my humanity. I will say it hasn't stopped from be being invaded though, which is pissing me off to no end because now I can't even fucking progress in the game without going into offline mode.

NEVER can find help when you need it.   >:|

All in all though, any complaint that I really have for the game is nit pick or mild annoyance at the absolute best. The fact of the matter is that in 90+ hours and 3 characters I am still playing the game, learning it inside and out, finding all its secrets and picking up all its intricacies. The game is still punishing and maybe more cheaply so, but its still a fucking blast. I've had a real hard time putting it down to play some of my other march releases, and I figure I will be playing this for a long long time to come still.

It feels like the whole point of this particular installment was to mess around with the balance of the game to see if it could both more welcoming to new players while at the same time maintaining if not increasing the difficulty. This a fairly good example of finding ways to change the formula without changing the game. It still feels and plays exactly like a Dark Souls game should, and certainly is a good thing.

Is Dark Sous 2 better than the first Dark Souls game? Honestly, right now I can't say that it is. But is it bad? Fuck no. It was a fantastic play through with what shows me to be one of incredible replayability. It's only March and there are a lot of games set to come out this year, but this is one that will be in my game of the year conversation going from this point forward, mark my words. The Souls franchise is one of the best in gaming and if you haven't played one yet then you are missing out.

"I don't wanna die anymore!" - Joel Heyman
Pretty much summarizes this entire game.