"Demastered"
Normally a second release of a game on next generation systems allows for the developers to not only make the obvious technical improvements but also fix the serious bugs the original version of the game had. Scholar Of The First Sin... feels like a downgrade. It's a upgrade in the way the framerate is better and there are some "improved" graphics in some areas, but it's still a really washed out game. Where my issues with this version of the game lie is with it's remixed enemies and other level design options.
The enemies being remixed will certainly provide a challenge to people who have played the original game by moving late game enemies to the early game. You can argue Dark Souls 1 had Black Knights scattered throughout Lordran, but they were both optional and not extremely difficult for first time players but would certainly give them a solid challenge. Putting all the Heide Knights into Heides Tower Of Flame works thematically and all but two of them sit there and wait for you to attack them before they fight you, which is good considering they telegraph their attacks very badly and can be pretty powerful. Sadly though, defeating the very easy Dragonrider boss makes all of them aggro at once, which is difficult since the Old Knight enemies are still in the area too, on top of that moving a dragon to the small circular platform in front of the Old Dragonslayer church, is however, straight up unfair, he can flame you from quite the distance and push you straight into the surrounding water because his flame attack pushes you back, goes on for so long it can hit you multiple times and the platform is so small that there is nowhere to go on it where you won't be hit by the fire.
Dark Souls 1, 3, Demons Souls and Bloodborne always felt like they were cleverly orchestrated so that each section of the game was tailored to make it a fair challenge even if the enemies were quite difficult to deal with, it is Dark Souls after all, but SotFS seems to make the already difficult to comprehend enemy placements found in the base game... worse somehow. I'm not sure why the designers of Dark Souls II thought that making the rush up to the bosses EVEN harder was a sure fire way to impress the fans instead of say, making the bosses themselves more interesting or just revamping their movesets or something. In the state it is, the walk up to the bosses is usually a much more frustrating ordeal than fighting what is the same lackluster bosses as the base game.
Another confusing choice is locking areas of the game off by putting statues in the doorways of essential areas. Whilst this was a problem in the base game, they've gone harder with this idea by placing yet more statues in different places and I find this ridiculously stupid. Not only is it insulting to player intelligence it ruins the immersion of the game world because why would someone place a statue specifically in a doorway? The fact that you need to obtain a Fragrant Branch Of Yore which is a rare, finite and expensive item to go into areas that were previously open in the base game is locking things off for no reason whatsoever. They've already increased the falling damage to the extreme to make sure no one goes down the hole in the main hub Majula to The Gutter too early into the game and cut off half the game with the Shrine Of Winter and that infamous pile of rubble on the way to castle Drangleic, but now they've put a statue in the doorway to the Ruin Sentinel fight in The Lost Bastille because.... I don't know? It's not a late game area or anything so why block it, you NEED to go through there to progress the game! Stopping a player from accessing the late game is something the series before this entry never shied away from because they trusted the player would know that the increase in difficulty would be a sign that they've come the wrong way or done the wrong thing, like the ghosts in New Londo Ruins or the Graveyard Skeletons in Dark Souls 1 or killing the woman in Lothric Church and being thrown into the fight against Dancer Of The Borreal Valley in Dark Souls 3, players should be able to tell when they've screwed up or gone the wrong way. Having any of this stuff at all just reveals poor level design or worse; no faith in player intelligence.
There's no denying there was a miasma of serious problems with the original Dark Souls II including, the 8 directional movement, the PVP being extremely broken, hitboxes being straight up bad, the levelling system allowing for even further confusion to the player as to the effectiveness of rolling in the game and many other horrendous things, but you can let a lot of them go if you assume the developers were planning SotFS from the start. Why fix old problems when you can make a directors cut special edition, it's supposed to be the ULTIMATE version of Dark Souls II. The problem is of course that so many of these problems are STILL present in SotFs. Things like the confounding choice to put an NPC vendor like Straid in a cell with exploding enemies where he can be killed by them or at least aggro to the player; locking off his unique ability to create boss weapons for the rest of the playthrough ARE STILL A PROBLEM, they remixed enemies, but kept the same idiotic ones in the worst places and ruined area's that were perfectly fine in the base game.
I don't know what the Dark Souls II team think difficulty is, I don't know if they think that frustrating the players is the experience they seek. I still enjoyed Dark Souls II for the same reasons that I enjoyed the others, but it is my least favourite game in the series because of all the problems, that is, until I played Scholar Of The First Sin, which is taking an already questionably tolerable experience and making it worse. I feel like I'm being generous giving it two stars.