I’ve been instructed by the various marketing campaigns of Dark Souls II to prepare myself for death. Death is inevitable in life and death is inevitable in Dark Souls II. You will die in Dark Souls II. You will die a lot in Dark Souls II. I would argue that one can never truly be prepared for death. Instead, one should ask, “Is death worth it?” In the case of Dark Souls II, the answer is yes.
Dark Souls II does not stray very far from the formula set by its predecessors. In fact, it’s almost a carbon copy of it. If you are unfamiliar with how it works, let me try to explain it to you. Dark Souls II is a fantasy action role-playing game. You play as a character (that you create) that has been cursed with being permanently undead. This is a problem because if you are left undead for too long, you lose your humanity and become “hollow”, which basically means insane. Your character is drawn to the land of Drangleic, whose inhabitants have been battling the curse for many years and have found a way to retain their humanity. Thus you set off on your adventure to keep your humanity and perhaps cure the curse indefinitely.
I would tell you more about the story, but I can’t. It’s not that I’m afraid of spoiling anything, it’s that I really don’t know too much else. Other than a pretty epic opening video and a monologue by a creepy old lady, you really aren’t given that much more in terms of storytelling. Characters you meet across the lands of Drangleic will give you little tidbits about the world and their particular involvement in it (if you pester them with the “talk” option enough), but there’s little else to go on. It’s a shame, too, because I found the world interesting enough to want to know more about it. The game just doesn’t do a good enough job of conveying its world to you.
Fortunately, the meat and potatoes of Dark Souls II come from surviving the adventure itself. When you create a character, you choose from a list of starting classes that determine your early fighting style. This isn’t set in stone, however, since you can adapt and level up your character based on how you want to play. The combat is still very visceral and hard-hitting. The enemies you fight are relentless. You really feel like everything is desperately trying to kill you and they will stop at nothing to make sure they do. Depending on the style of combat you choose, you should be prepared for reasonably long animations when you attack. Because of this, button mashing is rarely a viable option. You should plan out your strikes carefully because you could get yourself stuck in an attack animation that will leave you wide open for attacks. If you are familiar with Dark Souls, you will feel right at home here. The only key difference I could tell is that enemies seem to lock onto you more, making dodging or strafing around enemies much more challenging. I played through most of the game as an agile melee attacker with no shield and little armor, and I struggled until I decided to throw on a shield as a safety net.
Just when you think you got a handle on how the combat works, the game throws a different enemy type at you, and it keeps throwing different enemy types out you until near the end of the game (where they start to repeat). You will fight small, fast enemies that will strike you multiple times. You will fight giant, slow enemies that take long swings but can kill you in a single strike. You will fight enemies with poison arrows, fire bombs, magic missiles – the list goes on. This keeps you on your toes at all times. I found myself thinking very carefully about my approach whenever I would discover a new enemy or taking my time as I was uncovering new areas. As someone with very little patience, I find it refreshing that the game was designed so well that I wanted to take my time with and try to survive as long as possible. I did not want to die.
None of this would matter if, when you died, you could just hit the continue button and go back a little ways from a checkpoint. The most unforgiving aspect of Dark Souls II is the death penalty and the checkpoint system. Like its predecessor, you will only get a checkpoint when you rest at one of the many bonfires located throughout Drangleic. There are quite a few of them so it would seem like it’s not that big of a deal, but the challenge comes from the fact that they are often quite a distance from the boss encounter at the end of a given area. This wouldn’t prove to be a problem if the journey to the boss was a cakewalk, but any enemy (and I do mean any enemy) can kill you if you’re careless. This means you have to make the lengthy journey from the bonfire to the area boss with limited healing supplies while battling all the enemies before it. You then have to face the boss in whatever state your character is in when you get there. If you have no health and no way to heal, you’re out of luck. If you’re poisoned and have no way to cure yourself, you better hope you can kill the boss before the poison kills you. The bosses themselves also range from reasonably difficult to unbelievably challenging, so you will die more often than not on your first attempt. “Oh well,” you say to yourself. “At least I killed everything on the way.” Well, I’ve got some bad news for you: Whenever you are killed in Dark Souls, everything comes back (with few exceptions). Those salamander creatures that can instantly kill you when you turn to stone are back to give another shot at you. Those nimble yet heavily armored knights with spears have been revived to try and impale you once again. That’s not all, though. All of the souls you have accumulated up to this point have been dropped at the area where you were last killed, and if you die attempting to get them, you lose them for good.
As I mentioned, souls are acquired from defeating enemies (you also get them from using certain items). Souls are very important as you use them to level up your character (which makes you stronger) and you also use them to purchase valuable items to help you on your journey as well as upgrade your equipment. If you want any hope of overcoming the game, you need to make good use of your souls. This is why losing them is such a defeating feeling, especially if you’ve accumulated a lot at one time and lose them because of one careless mistake. There were definitely a few times where I lost a large sum of souls and just wanted to be done with the game for good. Also, every time you are killed, you lose a percentage of your overall health pool. The more often you die, the bigger the percentage gets until it maxes out at about 50% of your maximum life. While you can reverse this by using certain items or doing certain tasks and you can minimize the percentage by using certain pieces of equipment, it still makes a noticeable difference and makes a challenging scenario even more challenging. This design philosophy is almost unheard of in this day and age with the advent of frequent checkpoints, the ability of saving anywhere, adjustable difficulties, and so on. This system may prove to be too frustrating for some.
However, even with someone as impatient as me, I found this system to be extremely rewarding. I have never felt a greater stake in my own life in a video game more than I have while playing a Dark Souls game. My heart would race whenever I had a lot to lose and I was up against a daunting foe. The tension and excitement is almost unmatched. At the same time, the penalty for death doesn’t make the game insurmountable. It is just enough of a punishment to make your fear dying but not enough of a punishment to ruin the experience. No matter how many souls you lose, you can always get more. The only scenario I can see yourself getting into that would require a restart of the game would be if you spent your souls in the wrong attribute points while leveling up your character, but unlike the original Dark Souls and Demon’s Souls before it, you actually have a limited number of character resets that you can find throughout the world, giving your several chances to get your character to your exact specifications. The souls system really is brilliant and I would love to see similar things adapted in other games.
Another thing that is unique about a Dark Souls game (although not unique to Dark Souls II) is its take on multiplayer. The game seems to know just how unforgiving it is since it allows players to summon other players into their worlds as “phantoms” to help with difficult sections. Once the boss of the section has been defeated, the player who helped is returned to their world with a little reward for helping. Conversely, players can enter your world as a red phantom and try to kill you, which adds to the challenge. Players can also leave written messages (that you have to assemble from a list of small phrases – you cannot write custom messages) to help each other out. This helps you find secret areas that can lead to useful items and equipment or it can warn you about upcoming hazards that might be hidden around a corner. This is good, because in addition to the enemies you will be face, there are also environmental hazards that you have to watch out for, and a lot of them come without any warning at all. You would think, with this system, that people would abuse this privilege and leave false information just to be jerks – and you’d be right. There are plenty of messages that lead to nothing and/or your death if you are to follow the advice on them. However, you have the ability to “rate” a message (basically a “like” function) that helps to highlight the helpful messages over the useless or harmful ones. I left a few messages myself, and when your message is rated, you flash for a brief second and it tells you that a player approved it. I have no idea what this does, but I assume it did something beneficial. I wish the game was clearer about it.
I wish the game was clearer about a lot of things, actually. Like its predecessors, Dark Souls II leaves a lot of things up for player discovery, which means descriptions about items and other things are vague. There are large portions of the game that I still don’t understand even after having completed the story (as well of the stories of the previous two games in the Souls series) and it is because the game does a poor job at explaining itself. Covenants are little factions that characters offer you to join. They allegedly give you certain rewards for joining and doing certain tasks, but I couldn’t quite get a grasp on what the benefits really were or what the tasks that I had to complete were for most of the covenants. I just stuck to one of the early ones for the majority of the game because I was too confused and intimidated to try anything else. Other things, like items, equipment bonuses, and upgrade systems are also poorly explained. Because of this, I found myself sticking to the most basic of items and equipment. In order to figure these systems out, you would have to spend numerous hours (that I don’t have) experimenting, or you could look it up on a FAQ, but that ruins the fun for me. I will say that the interface and tutorials of Dark Souls II in general are vastly superior to those of its predecessors, but for something as major as items or covenants to still be confusing as they are to someone who has completed both of the previous games is unfortunate. I would imagine it would be even more confusing to new players who haven’t played the previous entries before. I feel as though I missed a big part of the fun by not understanding these systems and it really disappointed me.
Another disappointment I found was the design of the levels and bosses. While new players won’t experience this, Dark Souls II’s world and boss design pales in comparison to its predecessors. In Demon’s Souls, the tight, compact levels gave you a sense of dread and tension with its atmosphere. In Dark Souls, the interconnected world that you explored was so expertly designed that you felt like it was a real place, even though it was crafted to be fun and practical. In Dark Souls II, I got the feeling that I was just entering different levels that were thrown together at random. It feels as though several different people worked on the same levels and then combined their ideas hastily and haphazardly. Levels feel somewhat like they are constructed from a bunch of mini-challenges. Enemies were placed not because they organically fit, but because they needed to be placed there to add more challenge. The levels in general, with few exceptions, just seem to be less memorable than those of its predecessors. Even while I write this review I struggle to think of highlights. Also, for those who have played Dark Souls before, while there isn’t anything quite as explicitly offensive as Blighttown in Dark Souls II, there is not one, not two, not even three, but four different levels in which poison plays a key role in the challenge. Perhaps someday From Software will realize that poison is not a fun obstacle, but today is not that day.
The bosses are also quite a big disappointment, too. Most of the bosses are basically rehashes of bosses that we’ve seen in the previous installments. Even worse yet is the fact that a decent number of the bosses are just basic fantasy tropes: you will fight a giant spider, a giant rat, an army of giant rats, a dragon, and a group of skeletons, to name a few of the familiar ones. A lot of the ones that don’t fall into one of those categories are rather plain or basic with boring (albeit challenging) attack patterns. Both conceptually and mechanically, the bosses are just not as memorable as they have been.
That’s not to say they aren’t pretty to look at, though. In fact, the presentation of Dark Souls II is very impressive. Not necessarily from a technical aspect – we have seen better looking games before – but the art direction is top notch here. There were times where I was too distracted by the scenery to remember that I feared for my life. The architecture on some of the cathedral or castle levels is absolutely stunning. There’s something magical about walking across a drawbridge to a huge stone temple and looking out toward the sea to watching the sunset reflect off the water. There is a lot of visual variety to consume. The sound is also very satisfying, too (although not as satisfying as its predecessors). I’m pretty sure the sound of your weapon connecting to the flesh of the enemies is about as perfect a sound as we’re ever going to get, and the whoosh of the souls as they leave your fallen enemy and enter your body is just like taking the first bite of your favorite candy bar. Drangleic is a very beautiful place to inhabit which may help to diminish some of the frustration that you will experience in your adventure. The frame rate on the PC version is buttery smooth, too, which is a relief after the horrendous PC port of the original Dark Souls.
If you’re a fan of the Souls games, you’ll be happy to know that Dark Souls II is more Souls, although it might be a little less impactful than it was before. If you’ve been turned off to the Souls games in the past, Dark Souls II it too similar to its predecessors to really change your mind. If you’re interesting in trying a Souls game for the first time, I would recommend starting with Dark Souls II. It is the worst of the three games, but it is a tremendous action RPG that eases the player in better than its predecessors and I can easily recommend it to players who have been waiting years for another one.