I didn’t really want to write a review for Dark Souls 2(DS2). Instead I wanted to write something about the nature of a sequel and how DS2 fits into that. But I’m not really that good of a writer so instead you’ll be getting this.
Dark Souls 2 Review
DS2 is two different games. First, it’s a game in its own right and second it’s a sequel to Dark Souls and Demon Souls. And in a lot of ways, it’s probably the other way around. Certainly whenever I talk about DS2 I end up talking about Dark Souls. So this review will have two parts: the part where I talk about the merits of DS2 and the part where I compare DS2 to Dark Souls.
Let’s talk about DS2. DS2 is an Xbox 360 game. It is not a PC game, it is not a Xbox One game, or a PS4 game. The PC is a port of this game, not the other way around. So don’t come looking for next gen graphics, DS2 ain’t got none of that. With that said, DS2 looks amazing. DS2 is a sprawling game and the art design and graphics are superb. DS2 does not look perfect, but it looks good enough that I don’t mind the spots where it breaks down. Do the bonfires look a little pixelated and weird? Yes. Is there some frame dropping areas? Yes. Does it really matter? No, not to me. Will it bother other people? Debatable, but given people’s tendency to be hypersensitive and OCD, probably. But the criticism hardly has merit to me. It’s one thing to criticize a game for looking dumpy because the environments are lazily executed. It’s another to criticize a game for breaking around the edges because they are trying to cram a ton of content into a game. Moving on.
The sound design is fantastic. At some point while playing, I froze at the edge of an area because I didn’t want the music to change. It’s really fantastic. On the other hand, what the hell is up with the sound latency? Practically every time I come out of a bonfire, the sound doesn’t start working for five or ten seconds. NPCs are the most notable spot where this happens, particularly when returning to level up at the central hub. But I can put the little hangup aside, and I give the aesthetics top marks. Except in The Doors of Pharos, where the sound of traps being spammed became extremely repetitive and eventually madness inducing. I wonder if that is actually a meta-level booby trap for the player.
Something that’s become really important to me is control feel. Crappy controls, I’m out. Well, probably not out, but I’m not going to like it. DS2 has really tight controls. Mostly. There are some weird control thing that don’t feel responsive. Particularly the use of the primary healing item, ye Estus Flask. Most of these problems are a result of animation priority, which is more of a game mechanic than an actual flaw. However, the Estus Flask is really a bummer, and I’m going to talk about that more later because I can’t really talk about my problems with it without talking about Dark Souls.
Story is well, I’d say nonexistent, but there is clearly a story. Bad? I don’t know, it’s not good though. I’d say that it was a design choice how they rolled out the story, particularly since it's a similar format to Dark Souls, but I think their method isn’t particularly well executed and the story not great even if it was. Again, it’s hard to talk about what rubbed me wrong about this story without talking about the story of Dark Souls. Instead, I’ll keep moving.
Probably one of the worst things about DS2 is the lack of a real tutorial. Most of that is okay since DS2 doesn’t really give a crap about whether or not you’re having an easy time. In fact, I would go so far as to say that DS2 wants to make your life a living hell. But it is a real and actual problem when the game is HIDING core mechanics from you. Not including actual moves in your tutorial, flat out lying in stat descriptions (I’m looking at you ADP), and obscuring realities to the point that I only realized they existed after reading a wiki page after completing the whole game, that stuff is rotten. It isn’t hard, it’s just a dick move. The real problem with not having a good tutorial, though, is that you need the freedom to experiment. Unfortunately, DS2 doesn’t ever give that time or space to experiment.
Talking about a game in its components doesn’t give you the full picture. Dark Souls is a really well put together game with tight game mechanics and a beautiful world. The gameplay is punishing, but extremely fun with a robust character creation system. Each character is different depending on your play style, equipment preferences, and necessity induced by the game. And the boss fights are the real draw. Each boss is its own microcosm of gameplay. Most bosses hit hard enough to put you down in a few short moments, making each fight ramp up your adrenaline to 11 or higher. And just as your adrenaline spikes, the fight is over and a sense of profound pride settles in at having put that slobbering abomination into the ground.
And if everything I said makes it seem like DS2 is a great game, it definitely is. On the other hand, all the really bad stuff got pushed into the next section.
The Sequel Dark Souls 2
Oh boy, well I have a lot of gripes, so in fairness to anyone reading, I’m just going to list all these complaints so you can skip around. So here’s a list I made of all the bullshit in DS2. Also if you are sensitive to cursing, I apologize. I'm usually a reserved person with my language, but Dark Souls can really get under my skin.
Estus Flask is too slow
Shielding takes too long and doesn’t protect you from enough damage
Parrying sucks
Stun Lock is a total fucking mystery
Hollowing is a terrible solution to people not being a human in DS1
Estus Flask is still too slow
Level Design is made to get you killed in cheap ways rather than inventive ways
World Design is flat and disconnected
Tutorial falls short in explaining a ton of important things and gives no room for trial and error
Leveling up has to happen in Majula meaning around 40 seconds of load screens
Fucking Estus Flask gets me killed so fucking much
Well, the Estus Flask. I listed Estus Flask 3 times in that list of bullshit because it regularly makes me so fucking angry. But also, the Estus Flask feels like a representation of so many of the problems with DS2. The animation to heal your health is slow. Like unbelievably slow. It takes maybe 5 seconds from pushing the button until you regain control of your character. And there aren’t slow enemies in DS2. Even enemies much larger than you will run you down no matter how lightly loaded your character. In fact, most large enemies have exactly the same type of speed as their smaller counterparts, except they have a much larger range. What makes it worse, is that your Estus doesn’t fill your health immediately. It slowly replenishes your health.
So what often happens when you try to Estus is you back away from your enemy, wait for a lull in their attack, then furiously try to get in an Estus as your enemy recovers and come after your motionless moron of a character. The reason you’re using the Estus Flask is because you freaking need it. If you could afford to get hit again, you wouldn’t be using the Estus Flask. So getting hit is really bad. And as you stand, watching in horror, your foe will bear down upon your motionless character and inflict more damage than you currently have health, particularly since the fucking Estus health regen takes forever. Which is really annoying. I use the word annoying because that’s a pretty good place to start, but let’s build from there. Say you just spent two hours peeking around corners, fighting new enemies, and generally just trying to find the boss room relatively unscathed. Upon finding the door, you walk in and learn most of this bosses attacks before dying. You spend another hour trekking back to the boss. After which, he pulls out a new attack when you drop his health low and you end up dying. Now on your third trek, you make your way back to the boss room and succeed through most of the fight, taking a few small injuries that add up. You spot an opening that you would normal use to attack, but instead, whip out an Estus Flask. Suddenly, you realize that an Estus Flask takes MUCH longer than any of your attacks, even your Ultra Greatsword’s heavy attack. As you furiously mash the roll button, the boss calmly turns its head and throws down an unblockable attack, killing you instantly as your Estus Health hadn’t actually started giving you back health. Furious at the Stupid Estus you start your trek but, distracted by unhappiness you get into a bind on the way to the boss. Realizing you have better than 4 or 5 levels worth of souls in the boss room, you try to back away from your foes and use an Estus Flask only to realize that you’ll never get off an Estus against multiple foes. You die and with you goes all the progress you’ve made in the last 4+ hours. Imagine the frustration building up, now multiply that time a whole game. That’s what the frustration of the Estus Flask is like.
What’s doubly fucked is that they fixed this problem in Dark Souls. Like, all of them. The Estus works faster, your character stays rooted in one spot a few fractions of a second, giving you exactly enough time to roll or block if timed properly. The timing needed to be perfect, but it was fair. It was as if the designers of Dark Souls took the time to make the timing work out in your favor in DS1, and then worked out how to make it not work for you in DS2. And that really is the difference between DS1 and DS2.
The mantra of Dark Souls is hard but fair. And I would say that in every single circumstance except one or two, the game fulfills that perfectly. And I would say that DS2 would say they want the same thing, but I don’t think they do. When Dark Souls released a DLC pack, they released a new version called, Prepare to Die edition. It was a sort of a tongue and cheek reference to the difficulty of the game and the trial and error style that most players experience going through the game. But that’s what DS2 central idea is. We want you to die. Which is not fair, and in a lot of instances not fun. The Estus Flask reflects this perfectly. If they wanted you to live, they wouldn’t have fucked up the Estus Flask. And that is what they did. They took a really beautiful system and broke it.
Often times, as a franchise publishes more games, they make incremental improvements to the gameplay. What’s weird about DS2 is that all the incremental improvements are in DS1. It’s like DS2 has that Benjamin Button disorder and is aging backward. Small, but noticeable steps backward are everywhere in DS2. Which I’ll lead into the next section, the shields are so much worse. So many of the actual items are designed to leak damage, and lots of damage at that, onto the player. If an unblocked attack does 60% of your health in damage, which is not an uncommon occurrence, and your shield only blocks 70% of the damage, you won’t last terribly long. In fact, you’d go down in about 6 hits since .3*.6=.18 and .18*6>1. And six attacks is not long enough to learn the small timing windows to attack, retreat, and Estus. You’ll end up taking too much damage, try to Estus and remember above? Freeze, die, smash.
Not only do these shields have pretty crappy stats, but there is also a small time delay between pushing block, and between actually not taking(all) of the damage. Which is really a small change, but it sucks so hard. Why would they have messed with the shield timing? And worse, one of the in-game stats says that you can change the time it takes to raise your shield. Which is one step away from being a flat out lie as testing has shown the difference is somewhere in the range of 2 frames for every 20 levels. TWO FRAMES?! That is bullshit, and it won’t fix the problem. It just mitigates it.
So yeah, you’ll die, and that’s probably exactly what the game wants, but that’s not that big of a deal. You can just kill the enemies again if you lose your souls, right? Nope, more backward shit. For some fucking reason, the more you die, the less health you max out at. This is the worst. Not only is the game pushing you into situations where it expects you to die, it’s then penalizing you for doing it. Which is just fucked. Not to mention that after killing an enemy enough times, they stop respawning. Which is an incredible blessing when trying to get to a boss and an incredible curse when trying to farm for levels.
Another one of these mechanical backslides are the changes to the parry mechanic. Holy shit is the parry useless. In Dark Souls, the Parry mechanic was one of the most useful and clutch abilities. Large groups of enemies spell certain doom if not approached with caution, and the parry was vital in that it not only did really good damage, it also gave some much-needed invincibility. It was a rewarding feature that had high risks, but also high rewards. The parry in DS2 is pointless. It does the same amount of damage as a backstab and is riskier. Not to mention that in order to get the parry damage, you have to execute two different timing mechanics, one where you parry the strike, and a second as your foe falls to the ground and you have to riposte. And the worst part is you get zero invincibility frames while performing either of these actions. The parry mechanic’s timing has always been a little dicey, but it wasn’t too bad because you could just practice and there wasn’t too much of a penalty for dying. But notice, neither of those things are possible in DS2. I parried practically every enemy I could in Dark Souls. I basically parried a handful of enemies after the first few hours of playing. Which leads to the next problems guard break.
Guard break is when you press forward and light attack at the same time to stun a foe hiding behind a shield. I call it guard break, because DS2 doesn’t teach you this mechanic so it doesn't have an official name. I found it by accident when I hit one of the many enemies that hide behind shields with a stun and then followed it up with the critical hit. It’s a critical feature, but one that you only have to guess at. It is ridiculous that DS2 doesn’t teach you how to do this and honestly although it is useful, it doesn’t come close to replacing parrying mechanics and is much more dangerous than just backstabbing or safe combat.
Before I close this up, I wanted to make one more incredibly unfair comparison. The world of Dark Souls is remarkable for a ton of reasons, but not least because the whole world is actually, physically connected. Places seen in the distance are actual places. It is amazing, unparalleled world design, and DS2 can’t live up to it. It is unreasonable to expect any game to have the same caliber of world design as Dark Souls, so I never expected DS2 to be the miracle game that did. But, there was the hope...
Dark Souls 2 is created to make you die. Enemies are hidden around every corner waiting to screw you over. Not to say that Dark Souls didn’t hide enemies around corners, but Dark Souls was about being fair. Enemies hidden around corners would only punish you if you weren’t being cautious, or overextended trying to get a quick kill. DS2 doesn’t punish you for making mistakes. It punishes you for playing.
This review has been sitting open on my computer for the better part of a week. Partly because I was wrapping up all the side stuff I wanted to play in the game, but mostly because of my last sentence. People often end reviews and stuff with a cool last word that is often unfair. I’ve read that last sentence dozens of times, mostly because I want to delete it. But every time I get ready to delete it, I hesitate. I want to delete that sentence, but just because I want to delete it doesn’t mean it isn’t true. In some ways I love Dark Souls 2 for the game that it is. In other ways, I hate Dark Souls 2 for the game that it isn’t. Just because you love something doesn’t mean you have to apologize for its bullshit, and just because you hate something doesn’t mean you should dismiss all the good things about it.
I guess I should wrap this up with two stories. It took me less than a week to beat Dark Souls 2. Granted, it was sort of a slow week but still, if circumstances had been different, it would have been the week it came out. I missed several meals because I had Dark Souls 2 to play. I talked about it incessantly, and snuck covert glances at the wikipedia page when I was taking breaks at work. For five days, I ate, slept, and breathed Dark Souls 2. Not much of a story, but that’s the truth. I loved DS2.
After beating the final boss, I was running around finishing up little things that I had missed. I happened upon an optional boss I hadn’t fought, the Darklurker. Thinking myself fairly well equipped, I ventured into a fight with him. After a fairly successful early fight, the Darklurker… did some stuff I wasn’t ready for. Suffice to say, he killed me dead. Well acclimated to these sorts of defeats, I tweaked my gear and headed back into this fight. Things played out almost identically except with more questionable hitboxes. Frustrated but far from done I head back in a third time, except I don’t have any more human effigies, something that can’t easily be bought or found, but necessary to gain access to the boss. Annoyed I ran around for a few minutes and manage to find an effigy that I had overlooked. I head down toward the Darklurker when I suddenly slipped on a dark edge that was hidden from my view. I hated that feeling, and I hated DS2 for creating that moment.