Game of the Week: #2 Dark Souls II
Why is it so hated?
Introduction
I love Dark Souls II.
I Just wanted to get that off my chest. In the souls community, saying you like Dark Souls II is somehow perceived as saying “I hate every other souls game” or “I hate everyone who disagrees with me".”
That just isn’t the case. I like all of the other souls games while also enjoying Dark Souls II. Today I would like to examine what issues most players have with the game and try to persuade you into enjoying it as much as I do.
Background
Dark Souls II followed the infamous Dark Souls, which has become known as one of the greatest games of all time.
Pretty big shoes to fill, huh?
Well I think this is one of the main reasons for the perception surrounding Dark Souls II. People were expecting Dark Souls again and that just isn’t what they got.
Dark Souls II tries out new ideas and functions much differently. I believe that many of these changes are actually a positive and that most players do not put in the effort to respect what the game is trying to do.
Story
The first aspect that divides the fan base is the world in which Dark Souls II is set. The game is set in the kingdom of Drangleic, far away from Lordran. This immediately separates the story from it’s predecessor.
Dark Souls II also handles different core themes. The main theme of the game being memory, where as Dark Souls is more about the journey to overcome something and not give up.
I don’t want to harp on the story of either game, but I believe both are good in their own ways.
World Design
Many fans of the original Dark Souls did not like the introduction of bonfire warping in Dark Souls II from the start. I am of the belief that it was a great change. Dark Souls II is significantly bigger than the original game. The ability to teleport between bonfires really only adds to the experience by cutting out unnecessary backtracking and filler content. The world is still built in a way that allows for clever level design as well. Forest of the Fallen Giants is a great introductory level and there are many other examples of Dark Souls II still having excellent levels.
Gameplay
The Gameplay itself is the slowest of all of the souls games. A more methodical approach to combat is taken, relying on something akin to turn based combat.
Most interactions will go like this: The enemy swings its sword and you dodge, then you swing your sword and hit the enemy. Then repeat this occasionally mixed with some longer combos.
It is a simple formula but one that works quite well.
Rolling is improved with it now being omnidirectional and allowing for eight different directions to roll instead of just the four that the original Dark Souls provided.
Other improvements to combat include powerstancing, which allows the player to dual wield two different weapons with a unique move set.
In my opinion, while the gameplay is slightly slower it is overall still more enjoyable than the gameplay of the original Dark Souls. The only real complain I have is that it can feel a bit floaty at times and your attacks may lack weight.
The “Problems”
Now that I have gone over the general story and gameplay, I would like to highlight issues that many often have when discussing Dark Souls II. I believe many of these issues are baseless and often taken out of context to make the game look worse than it actually is.
Enemy Placement
The enemy placement is the complaint I hear most often in conversation relating to Dark Souls II.
There are A LOT of enemies in Dark Souls II. This is true and I won’t try to argue with that. I will argue, however, that having a lot of enemies is not an issue.
Dark Souls II is littered with traps designed for the player to use against these enemies. It also has the most healing items out of any souls game, allowing the player to heal more often. If there were less enemies the game would be laughably easy. It already is one of the easier souls games for players who do engage with these traps and use their healing items properly.
Many players just treat the game like the original game and ignore these aspects which ends up making the game even more difficult on themselves. Next time you play it, I implore you to use your consumables often for healing and use traps you find throughout the world. They are there for a reason.
Bosses
The bosses of Dark Souls II are a mixed bag, I will admit. This does not meant there are not good bosses.
Fume Knight, Velstadt, Looking Glass Knight, Lost Sinner, Sir Alonne, Sinh, Ivory King, and I could still keep going.
The biggest issue is really the amount of bosses. Somewhere in development, Fromsoft decided to start giving anything and everything a huge health bar and called it a boss. For example, Skeleton Lords.
This fight is literally just thirty skeletons in a room.
Oh wait, we can’t forget the Rat Vanguard, which is… thirty rats in a room.
I could sadly give more examples of this. I truly do think if they just got rid of the boss health bar and treated these like regular encounters more players would forget about them and focus would be shifted to the better bosses. It isn’t like these mob bosses are hard, they are quite easy actually. They mostly just end up turning the focus away from great bosses.
The Final Verdict
Do not fall for the “Dark Souls II is bad” propaganda. Dark Souls II is an amazing game. While it might not be the original Dark Souls, it experiments and tries out new mechanics in a way that is fun as long as you engage with it the way it wants you too. If you play Dark Souls II the way it was intended to be played you will have fun.
I absolutely love the world of Dark Souls II. My only problems with the game are the pacing and the adaptability stat. I do not revisit it often, but man I love just sitting in Majula . Probably the greatest hub area in any of the souls games. Great post!
Dark Souls 2 is definitely better than most people give it credit for, and continues the FromSoft tradition of introducing half-baked ideas that never get properly developed, which is always the thing that keeps me coming back to these games. The expanded torch mechanics, the power stancing, the more engaged NPCs, soul memory, all the odd covenants, all of it seems like the sort of mechanics that could've made the game stand out better if they'd been centered a little more.
The world and layout is the easiest thing to complain about, because it's a betrayal of one of DS1's biggest selling points, but I think most people who harp on it couldn't really tell you why DS1's world was better in specific terms. To me, the awkward transitions and nonsensical physical relationships feel less like a dreamlike melding of worlds and more like a desperate stitching together of completed zones as time and budget ran out, and it makes me think the real menace to DS2 was the team's ambition. You can see bits and pieces of how the world was intended to join together in a more coherent and grand fashion, and my suspicion is that they planned for it to be a much more open world... not Open World the way Elden Ring is, but maybe more like a 3D Zelda game, before they hit the point where technical and developmental limitations forced them to just link everything together with elevators and hallways. The early Souls games are, after all, barely able to function properly if you interfere with all the little tricks they came up with to deload things you're near but can't see, keep local enemy and physics object count low, and so on, and I can't imagine the nightmare they'd had on their hands trying to debug areas like Brightstone Cove already, with all the little navmesh ramps for enemies to move around to different layers, that one pig you're supposed to guide all the way down for the pickaxe, a door that triggers a landslide... I'm amazed so much of it works as it is.
Bosses and combat are where I really get annoyed with replays of DS2, and a lot of it is because of the 'turn-based' feel to it that you mentioned. Now, I also didn't like the shift to character action in DS3 and Elden Ring, with all the dodgerolling through 7-hit combos and giant monsters stomping through an arena bigger than some whole DS1 zones and making you jog for 30 seconds to get back to hitting them. But the way attack animations feel so stiff and canned in DS2 reminds me of bad 16bit era fighting games, where you just do a move and kind of hope it doesn't get interrupted or can actually land, and half the time it feels like the hitboxes or forced character movement is specifically designed to make followups whiff. Combine that with FromSoft's tendency to give bosses terrible hitboxes, vacuum-powered grabs, and DS2's overuse of boss adds and hordes, and then we can start talking about the decision to tie iframe duration to stat breakpoints... it's tough to really definitively declare that any of the games does combat 'right' or 'wrong' because they all have such secretly convoluted mechanics when you dig into them, but DS2 strays from the general Souls model of combat feeling straightforward and reliable and does feel like you're playing a Tactics RPG where none of the stats or skill explanations are available in-game. I do think that some of the bosses, and a lot of the boss designs, are still very good, and picking on it for crap like Rat Vanguard and Congregation doesn't hit as hard post-Elden Ring, which had much dumber dumb bosses, and way more of them.
Last year, when I replayed DS2, I did it with the Seeker of Fire 2.0 mod, and it was a pretty good change of pace. The number one thing it does is change up the game's progression, by changing where certain routes connect to other maps and adding a lot more additional warps between areas, meaning you can get to places a lot 'earlier' than normal, and they kind of weave in the DLC zones to the main game progression in interesting ways. Unfortunately, it also makes the layout even more confusing and incoherent than in the base game, but if you have played DS2 enough already you can keep track of where you've been and where you can look next same as you would playing a fog-wall randomizer. The thing that the mod did that I think worked really well, though, is changing up a lot of the boss encounters and areas to be more well-thought out. For example, you fight Covetous in the old Ruin Sentinels arena, Congregation is removed and there's instead a new boss fight at the bottom of Brightstone Cove, and Frigid Outskirts is less annoying and has a unique fight instead of a reskinned duo. It also removes the scaling iframes from adaptability, and lets you take the cat ring as a starting gift, so you can explore the well right away. It's not perfect, and has problems of its own, but I definitely recommend it if you want to try a remix of DS2 in the future.