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.