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| The character is one of the Forlorn, which are a group of dark spirits that invade you at random points throughout the game and are only found in the Scholar of the First Sin edition of Dark Souls 2. |
Developer: From Software
Publisher: Namco Bandi Games
Version(s): PC, PS3, Xbox 360, PS4 (reviewed), and Xbox One
Price: $49.99
Release: March 11th, 2014
I'm going to say this right off the bat: Dark Souls 2 is a good game. While I have a massive number of issues with the game that I will cover in this review that make me seem like I hate this game's guts, my issues are likely not going to affect the average consumer. Dark Souls 2 and its rereleased version Scholar of the First Sin, which I played before doing this review because it is the definitive edition of the game, are everything they say they are. Dark Souls 2 is an extremely difficult action role playing games set in a dark fantasy world on the brink of collapse. If that is what you are looking for, Dark Souls 2 has you covered. But if you are looking for a game that is a worthy successor to Dark Souls 1, you will be severely disappointed.
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| This is a prerelease screenshot of Dark Souls 2. This area in the final game looks no where near as good as it does in this screenshot. |
The story of Dark Souls 2 is that you are some random schmuck suffering from the Curse of the Undead, who goes to the ancient kingdom of Drangleic, which supposedly has a cure for the curse. You get there and get laughed at by a bunch of weird old ladies. After that, you do to the tutorial area and get to the hub town, Majula. There you speak with the Emerald Herald, who tells you to seek the king and usurp his throne. So then the story goes from “find a cure for your curse” to “become the next monarch of Drangleic.” The story is divided into roughly three acts. Act 1 is to explore the land and find the defeat to Four Great Ones and take their souls so that you may prove yourself a worthy monarch. Act 2 is find out how to ascend the Throne of Want, and Act 3 is to find the crowns of all the previous kings so that you may become the "true monarch" -and this act is only available to players of the original version of Dark Souls 2 if they bought the DLC trilogy that came out after the game's release.
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| Brume Tower is one of the areas exclusive to the Crowns DLC Trilogy that came out after the original Dark Souls 2 and is integrated directly into the Scholar of the First Sin edition. |
It seems that the developers got the purpose of lore and plot structure of Dark Souls 1 mixed up in Dark Souls 2. In the original Dark Souls, the world you were exploring was very mysterious, strange, and you had little knowledge of what exactly was going on. Even so, what your goal was throughout the game was crystal clear. In Dark Souls 2, however, every character you meet over-explains everything about every area you go to ruining that sense of mystery that made Dark Souls 1 so great. However, when it comes to your actual goal in the game, the thing that is motivating you to beat it, the game is very tight lipped. In fact NPCs will often tell you you're doing the things you do "without really knowing why." Even the intro cinematic feeds you that line. If I don't know why I'm doing the things I'm doing, why should I care? None of the NPC ever seem to come up with a good reason to care about anything to be honest.
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| The intro cinematic for Dark Souls 2 is visually fantastic, but lacks any concrete context for your characters actions or goals. |
Speaking of NPCs, another thing that makes the narrative of Dark Souls 2 far inferior to Dark Souls 1 is its lack of quality NPC storylines and quests. Most NPCs in the game have quest lines copy and pasted straight from Dark Souls 1 and the ones that don't are woefully underdeveloped. I also have a hard time remembering most of the names of the NPCs since they’re so unremarkable. The lone character in the entire game that I found extremely memorable was, ironically, a character that was forgetting who they were. Forgetting seems to be a major theme that Dark Souls 2 wanted to explore, but the developers were too afraid to stray too far away from Dark Souls 1 themes of fire and darkness, so they dropped it, and all that is left are traces of the theme of forgetting.
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| Lucatiel of Mirrah is one of the only interesting and compelling characters in Dark Souls 2. |
From a mechanical level, for every step Dark Souls 2 takes forward it takes another step back. You can now warp between different areas of the game using bonfires from the very start which is good, but this seems to have caused the developers to be lazy in developing levels, since they could just put a bunch of bonfires in one level and not have to think as hard about the layout of levels. Contrast this with Dark Souls 1 where there was usually one bonfire area per area, and you opened shortcuts that lead back to the bonfire allowing you to bypass areas you have already gone through. Dark Souls 2 also touted the addition of a new lightning system that would have forced players to forsake a shield for use a torch in dark areas, but the lightning system was removed right before the release of Dark Souls 2 and the areas that would have used the lightning system had there brightness level artificially increased, which looks just awful.
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| This room was shown in early previews as a pitch black area that could only be lit by a torch. In the final game you can easily navigate this room without ever having to use a torch at all. |
The balance between Dark Souls' real time combat and its stat building RPG mechanics have also been destroyed thanks to the inclusion of the Agility stat. In Dark Souls 1 the only thing that could affect your rolling speed was your equip load, but it was built around the idea of characters wearing light armor focusing on dodging, while characters wearing heavy armor rely on poise to absorb enemy attacks. The addition of Agility, however, makes it possible for light armored characters to get hit even when dodging and a heavy armored characters impossible to hit even at close range. It’s a shame that the Agility stat hurts the game so much because Dark Souls 2 has the best character building options out of all the Souls games thus far. The amount of armor sets, weapons, and spells is just amazing and one of my favorite aspects of Dark Souls 2.
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| The Agility stat forces you to put points into it just to be good the real time combat and discourages making more experimental character builds. |
Another good idea that the developers screwed up was the new Hollowing mechanic and how it ties into the multiplayer. In Dark Souls 1, when you died in human form you became Hollow and to get back you had to sacrifice a rare item at a bonfire to become human again. However the only real penalty of Hollowing was you couldn't summon other players for help, but you also couldn't be invaded by other players. So players that like playing by themselves never really saw a reason not to just stay Hollow unless they wanted to kindle bonfire for a few extra sips for their Estus Flask. In Dark Souls 2, hollowing is a more gradual process and every death would decrease your maximum health a small until your health was half of what it should be. This is, in theory, a good system that encourages players to try and stay human more often leading to more cooperation and invasions.
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| Dark Souls 2 has an abundance of NPC summons you can use to help with boss fights and tough areas. Which is great for when the online servers will inevitably go offline years from now. |
Where Dark Souls 2 screws this up in practice, however, is that cooperation is locked off the instant you die once in human form. It would have been better if cooperation was cut off after a few more deaths, giving you a few more chances to beat a boss before you had to use a Human Effigy to restore your humanity, and might have made it so the developers didn't have to give out Human Effigies in the end game areas like they were Christmas presents to compensate for the difficult boss fights in the end game areas. Also unlike Dark Souls 1, you can be invaded by other players while Hollow now, though thankfully you can block them for a limited time by burning a Human Effigy at a bonfire. Too bad you can't block the abundant number of NPC invaders Dark Souls 2 has to offer. These NPC invaders have also been designed to act like real human players, and some of them are just evil in the tactics they use against you. I would praise the AI of these NPC phantoms if they weren't so common and played by different rules from human player phantoms. To end this diatribe on the multiplayer of Dark Souls 2, the Covenants are as unfinished as they were in Dark Souls 1, which is just a crying shame.
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| The abundance of NPC invaders mean that players will be able to feel the thrill and terror of being invaded even after the servers are gone, but the fact they play by very different rules then human players is infuriating. |
Enemy and boss design in Dark Souls 2 has also taken a major hit with the vast majority of them being large humanoids wielding giant weapons. Any enemy or boss that doesn't conform to the "dude in armor wielding a giant weapon" archetype are lifted straight from Dark Souls 1. Scorpioness Najka is just Chaos Witch Quelaag, but uses sorcery instead of pyromancy. The Royal Rat Authority is just Great Grey Wolf Sif without a sword and with four rat minions that inflict toxin to arbitrarily increase the difficulty of the battle. Enemies also track you with their attacks making it hard to dodge them, and often makes them look like they are standing on top of a record player. Hit boxes are also wonky with enemy weapons hitting the ground two feet away from my character somehow registering as a hit. Regular enemies also tend to have ludicrous amounts of health that makes them take many hits to take down, and they often attack in groups. This design philosophy of "if something seems to easy then dump a bunch of enemies around to make it harder" is the worst thing about Dark Souls 2, and it made me almost just quit on it multiple times.
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| The Smelter Demon represents some of the worst elements of Dark Souls 2 boss design. |
I've spent the vast majority of this review criticizing the hell out of Dark Souls 2, but there are things I really like about this game. I'm a big fan of the streamlined weapon upgrading and boss weapon creation, even if you still have to jump through a lot of hoops to find the merchants that do it. There are a few levels I really liked such as the Forest of Fallen Giants, No Man's Wharf, and The Gutter. Some people don't like the new emphasis on weapon degradation, but I think it's a good idea. It encourages you to rely on more than one weapon and set of armor and experiment a little. I also like that magic feels better to use and is visually cool to look at… though I'm still mad that you can no longer be a Pyromancer when you begin the game.
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| The Gutter is one of the only areas that make use of the torch which makes for a very nice change of pace. |
There is a lot to like about Dark Souls 2, but it simply just isn't as tightly focused as the original Dark Souls. Dark Souls 1 was about being a nobody trying to make an impact in a world so much bigger than you. A world that didn't care about you and could kill you are a moment's notice, but also didn't feel particularly malicious towards you either. The world of Dark Souls 1 was indifferent to you, but the majority of the people you met on your journey always wished the best for you. You felt that despite all the game was throwing at you that you could win and that the people that made the game wanted you to win too. Dark Souls was about keeping hope in the face of utter hopelessness and that it such a powerful message for a game to have and one I will never forget.
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| I will never forget the Kiln of the First Flame, the final area of Dark Souls 3, but I can't even be bothered to remember the Throne of Want, the final area of Dark Souls 2. |
Dark Souls 2 on the other hand focuses entirely on you. You, the bearer of the curse. You, the next monarch of Drangleic. You, the one that will sit the Throne of Want. You, the one that will gather the crowns and transcend the curse. You are extremely important and everyone seems to hate you. The world itself seems to want you dead with impossible odds around every corner. The respites you do find feel undeserved as you had to resort to cheap tactics to win many or your battles because so many fights are simply stacked against you. You feel who designed these encounters wanted only to watch you suffer and die over and over again. And even you do succeed and either sit the throne or renounce it you feel nothing, it’s almost as if the game is mocking you for finishing it, after all you've been the only thing you feel is...Hollow. At least how I felt after beating Dark Souls 2. The exact opposite of how I felt after beating Dark Souls 1. It would have been a great artistic statement if I also wasn't sure that it was intentional or not. It feels more like the result of various designers disagreeing about how things should go and compromising with each rather than one creative vision.
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| Majula, the central hub area of Dark Souls 2, looks gorgeous and has beautiful background music, but feels no where near as lively as The Nexus from Demon's Souls or Firelink Shrine from Dark Souls. |
So if you're in the mood for a decent dark fantasy role playing game, Dark Souls 2 has you covered as long as you don't expect something that blows Dark Souls 1 out of the water. I'm not sure how Dark Souls 3 is going to play out, but it looks like it going back to its roots taking elements from both Dark Souls 1, Demon's Souls, and even a little Bloodborne to make the best Souls game there ever was. And with series creator Hidetaka Miyazaki back as the director, I think that Dark Souls 3 will be just fine.
You can buy the original version of Dark Souls 2 for PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 for $20 at pretty much any game retailer, but I would highly recommend getting the Scholar of the First Sin Edition which comes with the 3 Three DLCs bundled in and a host of graphical and design improvements for $50 at most game retailers.
This review was written by The Gaming Lycanthrope and Edited by Forma.
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