Having finally jumped on board the Dark Souls train earlier this year, it made sense to continue onto its somewhat inconsistent sequel. In this case, I picked up a copy of the Scholar of the First Sin edition for Playstation 4. Being Dark Souls, I heard mostly positive things going into it, but there was a sprinkling of complaints and criticisms.
Perhaps the most glaring difference between Dark Souls and Dark Souls II is the boss designs. Though there are a few good bosses with the right amount of challenge and intimidating design, the majority of them are forgettable. Many of them are even rather straight forward to defeat. Of course, a generally reliable tactic would always be to circle around and stab in the back, but that's almost all there is in Dark Souls II. Many bosses have an attack that damages in a close "area of effect," forcing players to have to step back from time to time, but that circle-stab tactic is efficient. The DLC provides some pretty challenging bosses, but with just a small handful of exceptions in the main game, they aren't really worth noting. Just for a comparison on the final bosses: it took me maybe five to six hours total of trial and error to beat Gwyn, Lord of Cinders at the end of Dark Souls. To defeat Nashandra at the end of Dark Souls II, it took all of ten, maybe fifteen minutes, tops.
(Probably my biggest complaint with bosses, though, is how frequently they resort to "two on one" set ups to provide the challenge. Almost always, the hardest bosses are the ones that tip the balance numerically.)
Of course, that is not to say the game is easy overall. For the first half of the game, I actually struggled a lot more with the basic levels than I did with the bosses. It seemed like there were a lot more areas of ambush, and there were more moments with an almost overwhelming number of enemies attacking at once. Some of the common enemies are noticeably tougher than the previous game. There appeared to be fewer traps laid about the pathways, but the environments did tend to create more opportunities for plummeting to death. Plus, there were some areas with status-inflicting stones that made traversing the corridors more difficult. In the Black Gulch, for example, you have to navigate a minefield of poison-spitting stones. In the Shaded Ruins, there are stones that inflict curse if you wander near. The use of environment seemed a bit better in terms of adding to the difficulty.
But that leads to one of the biggest annoyances within the game. In the first Dark Souls, you accumulate souls and then spend them to level up your attributes at bonfires. Any bonfire will do. In Dark Souls II, however, you level up by speaking to someone in the hub town of Majula. This means that wherever you are, you need to find a bonfire, warp back to Majula, talk to the Emerald Herald, speak with her, and then you level up. Functionally, it is ultimately the same. Since you can warp to and from any bonfire, it essentially is the same as being able to level up anywhere. It gets kind. It feels like a waste of time, and you can't help but wonder why exactly it is that you can't just level up at the bonfire you're at.
The ability to warp to and from all bonfires also kind of hurts the game in some respects. You wind up losing a bit of connection to the world. Instead of having to backtrack frequently and get a better lay of the land, you can wind up just going from bonfire to bonfire, and then just warping whenever you need to get anywhere. It essentially takes away from some immersion in the world. In the first game, warping came late as a reward. Until then, you had to wander. Not only did this give players a better understanding of the world's layout; it also gave players a stronger connection to it since we had to walk everywhere. The inconvenience of constantly retreating to Majula to level up is slightly off-set by the convenience of being able to warp anywhere else, but it kind of loses some of that original Dark Souls feeling of having to work your way back, especially to find your merchants.
One of the biggest changes to the gameplay is the way dying makes an impact. Souls still get dropped at the spot of your death, but when you return in Hollow form, there is an actual penalty. Every time you die, your max health drops a bit. Die again in Hollow form, it drops more. If you find yourself dying a lot (and being Dark Souls, there are sections where you likely might), then you constantly respawn with less and less health, which makes the game more difficult. You can revert back to Human form with a human effigy, but sometimes those come few and far between.
I think I understand the point of this design element. In terms of the game's lore, Hollow form is a cursed form of being. According to the mysterious narrative, being in Hollow form is not supposed to be great. In the first game, you die and respawn, but there is no discernible difference between Human and Hollow. The only real consequence of being in Hollow is that you can't summon allies should you need them. They clearly wanted to put more emphasis on the horrible side of being Hollow, so they created a much more pronounced punishment. However, I found this to be a little bit problematic in the early stages of the game. It's so easy to die in those early moments. When you get to a point of greater difficulty, this change actually makes the game harder. Eventually, I did break through and was able to push on, but there was a good stretch early on where losing health every time you died (and especially with the lack of human effigies in the beginning) just made the game feel frustrating and unfair. I'm not so sure making a game harder when players are starting to struggle more really is great design, myself.
That said, I can see some positive aspects to it. For starters, if you don't keep getting frustrated to the point of quitting altogether, the increasing difficulty early on forces players to experiment more to figure out how to beat enemies that are giving them trouble. So much of the Dark Souls experience is built around learning the environment and the enemies and the game itself. While I maybe found the health cost to be a bit too steep, it did force me to try new approaches to certain areas. By the end of the game, my overall impression was that it was actually a bit too easy. Additionally, one of the ways to obtain human effigies is to help other players beat bosses in jolly cooperation, or to invade and win PVP battles. So, the shortage of human effigies early could potentially push some players into doing more online stuff (which is not my thing at all, but it might be for others). While I was not a fan of the less health the more you die mechanic, I do recognize potential benefits to it.
Leveling up has never really been as important as upgrading equipment, but it seems to matter even less in the sequel. In fact, leveling comes pretty easily. For comparison, I beat Dark Souls at around level 85. I beat Dark Souls II at around level 215. (Granted, I also spent twice as long playing the latter, but that's still a substantial difference.) The thing that's funny about that, too, is that the game has these sort of preventative measures to deal with the possibility of grinding and over-leveling. Another break from the original game is that in II, enemies only respawn a certain number of times. If you kill the same enemy X number of times, they disappear from the game entirely. This means that it is possible to clear the entire game so that you could wander around without encountering anyone.
I think the idea is that this prevents players from simply grinding to the point that they become too powerful with their stats. It means that there is a finite number of enemies, and a finite number of souls you can possibly collect in a given playthrough. The one downside to this is that if you do find yourself repeating a section for a while, eventually you find yourself walking about with no concerns. It can make areas rather boring. Of course, they clearly don't mean for you to do much backtracking with the warp system in place from the beginning, but it can still render some parts safe and tedious to trek through. At times, it even seems strategic to clear the area before a boss so that you can level up and provide a safe path straight to a big fight from the bonfire, limiting the consequences of a potential loss.
For my money, I still prefer the first game. I found the sequel to be very frustrating early on in a way that the original game wasn't, and it took a much longer time before I actually felt comfortable in II. (As an aside, I also found the lock-on function dreadfully inadequate and far less reliable than in the first game.) That said, Dark Souls II isn't exactly disappointing, even if many bosses actually were. It is still a satisfying challenge, and the experience is still unreasonably rewarding. It just felt a little more disjointed in all its design elements as a whole. Still, there's something to be said about the fact that I spent over twice as many hours on Dark Souls II. It does retain almost all of the elements that made the original game so great.
REDUCTIVE RATING: Pretty Good
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