The Souls games are notorious for being unforgiving. The fact that even the most basic enemies can kill the careless player is only made all the more daunting by the fact that the souls you collect to gain power will disappear if you fail to return to the spot of your death and touch your bloodstain. But the Souls games are also notorious for being clunky, glitch-filled and frustratingly vague about their mechanics. And while Dark Souls II does unfortunately have some of the same glitches as its predecessors, improvements to the feel of the combat and changes in the way characters are balanced make it more accessible to new players while maintaining the difficulty the series’ fans have loved since their first rage-induced run off a cliff.
Set in a land called Drangleic some indeterminate time after the events of the first Dark Souls, players are tasked with finding the four Old Ones and becoming the next monarch in an attempt to bring the land out of darkness. In keeping with the Souls tradition, that’s about as direct as any of the storytelling gets, with most of the finer details of the background of Drangleic and its connection to Lordran of the first Dark Souls being left for players to discover through item descriptions, conversations with NPCs and clues hidden in the environment.
Again in keeping with Souls tradition, each area in Drangleic is littered with ambushes, traps and secrets that encourage players to explore as much as possible in hopes of finding things to aid them in their quest. Exploration is particularly important in Dark Souls II as players now start the game with only one Estus Flask, a healing item that can be replenished simply by resting at the bonfires that serve as checkpoints throughout the land. To get more of these flasks and to increase their potency, players have to acquire items called Estus Flask Shards and Sublime Bone Dust respectively. The game’s other primary healing item, Lifegems, can be purchased for souls from merchants, found in the environment or dropped from enemies.
Which of these healing items you use will end up being important not only because of how you obtain them but also because of how quickly they do their job. Estus Flasks recover more HP more quickly than Lifegems, but using them brings your character to a complete stop for about a second longer than it did in the first game. So, if you’re just missing a little bit of health and are afraid of being finished off by a particularly savage attack, Lifegems may just be the way to go.
In addition to not being able to heal as quickly, at least right off the bat, certain other actions have been slowed down as well. The guard-breaking shield bash and the parry have been slowed down to keep PVP focused more on strategy rather than twitch reflexes, and characters aren’t as quick to raise their shields. The roll animation also doesn’t start with as many invincibility frames as it used to. These changes may all sound like unnecessary ways of making an already punishing series even more punishing, but you needn’t worry because Dark Souls II actually gives you direct control over just how fast most of the above actions are by letting you put points into a new attributes called adaptability.
Having high adaptability means you block and use your standard healing items more quickly, your roll has more invincibility frames, and your character is more resistant to various status effects. As nice as all these things are, the game also does not force to you put all your point into adaptability to have a chance at beating it. In fact, Dark Souls II does more to encourage players to invest in multiple attributes than Dark Souls vanilla did. The bonus from putting points into a particular attribute begins to diminish when it enters its 20s, and more weapons get attack bonuses from more than one attribute, such as strength and dexterity. This means that using a weapon with C-rank and B-rank bonuses for two stats is more comparable to a weapon with an A-rank bonus for just one.
The same holds true even for magic users who may want to put points into intelligence and faith for sorceries and miracles and the game’s (mostly) new magic type, hexes. Developing both stats confers the same bonus to fire (intelligence) and lightning (faith) damage while also granting a bonus to dark (hex) damage. It’s also worth noting that casters are more viable in melee combat than before, as the damage for several weapons scales with said elements. However you allot your stats, if you want to change them up a bit to help you during a rough section of the game, or even if you just want to experiment with some different gear, you can reallocate your points by using a new item called a Soul Vessel. This item isn’t unlimited, but careful exploration will yield enough of them to give you some added flexibility during your adventure.
You could even use a Soul Vessel to become better suited for PVP, which plays a somewhat more prominent role in this game depending on which optional areas you explore. Two of these areas often have you invaded by two people at once, and the other two summon you automatically to another player’s world, where they can set traps for you. Depending on how good you are at handling multiple threats, these areas can be frustrating. But, they’re also very short, and there are even some tricks you can take advantage of to make them easier.
Outside of these areas, however, the franchise’s much-feared invasion system shouldn’t be a problem. Matchmaking is now based solely on character level as opposed to the total number of souls collected, and much of the best gear in the game has higher stat requirements to use effectively. So, assuming you actually get invaded (I didn’t encounter a normal invasion until I beat the game), you don’t have to worry about being overwhelmed.
While being invaded is no longer the pervasive threat it used to be, Dark Souls II also features many more boss encounters than its predecessors, and many of these encounters have you fighting more than one powerful enemy at a time. The important thing to remember during these fights is that the bosses who make up a mob tend to be much more fragile than the bosses who go it alone, meaning that these fights are often about finding the weakest link and getting rid it as soon as possible. Conversely, bosses who fight you one-on-one, are much stronger and tougher, presumably because they didn’t spend time chit-chatting with their allies instead of focusing on their daily exercises like they should have been. These bosses will likely be able to kill you in just a few hits, and memorizing their attacks patterns will be paramount to your success.
Should certain bosses or areas of the game prove too much, you have a few options. The first two involve getting feedback from other players, which comes in the form of messages and bloodstains. Everyone can send messages by bringing up the start menu and accessing a list of predefined phrases and words that are intended to be used as hints for other players. Just be advised that if you see a message saying “liar ahead” and another message near a cliff telling you to jump off, you should think twice before expecting to find any kind of treasure. You also have the option of examining the bloodstains on the ground to view what is basically a cautionary snuff film, in which a phantom representing another player acts out the last few seconds before its untimely demise. A less morbid option allows to summon other players into your world as phantoms to fight alongside you for a limited time, although doing so does mean bosses gain more HP.
If there’s one major change that detracts from Dark Souls II, it’s how the world is laid out. Whereas the world of the first Dark Souls was so interconnected that exploring it was like exploring some giant, wondrous funnel cake, the layout of Dark Souls II is more readily likened to a bunch of spokes jutting out from the center of a wagon wheel. That’s not to say that exploration is any less meaningful – indeed, I’ve already mentioned the importance of finding Estus Flask Shards – but there’s never a moment where you leave one area to discover a place you’ve already been to and think, “What if I tried this backward next time?”
There are also some performance and gameplay issues to watch out for. The PS3 version has some minor hiccups with the frame rate, and the audio occasionally hitches up and replays select sounds a couple times, but these never really get in the way. The real problems come from some rough spots with the controls that have appeared in both previous Souls games. There will times when the controller won’t register your inputs, which can be singularly frustrating when you’re trying to get off an attack or heal yourself during a brief lull in the action. Also, the frequent encounters with multiple enemies means issues with locking on to the proper enemy or switching between targets arise more often. Learning to compensate for these issues doesn’t take too long, but needless to say, the game would be better off without them.
Despite having some rough edges and being set in a world that isn’t quite as profoundly impressive based solely on the merits of its design, the tweaks to the balance and feel of the gameplay make exploring that world just as fun. And, while certain key actions have been slowed down, the overall pace of the combat has been sped up so that playing Dark Souls II is more akin to playing a proper action game rather than a somewhat-clunky action RPG without sacrificing the tension that makes the Souls games so special.