Most of the time when I take the contrarian stance on something like this I can kinda understand why most people hate/love it while I feel the complete opposite but with Dark Souls 2 I just genuinely cannot comprehend why people feel the way they do about it. Whenever I play this game and remember the way people talk about it online it makes me feel like I'm going insane. This game does maybe one single bad thing (soul memory) and most of the rest of it is leagues above the other souls games barring maybe Demon's Souls (I go back and forth on the two constantly but rn I think I like DS2 more). Without engaging too much with the endless shit-flinging internet debates surrounding this game I will say none of the complaints I've heard raised against it are even remotely compelling and frankly a lot of them sound completely deranged. Oh, going up an elevator from a mountain to the caldera of a volcano is so immersion-breaking that it ruined your entire experience with the game? As if Tomb of the Giants showing you Lost Izalith and Ash Lake in a way that clearly depicts all three areas being on the same level of depth doesn't break the illusion of the first game's world just as blatantly?

Regardless it's pretty pointless to compare this to DS1, I can completely understand liking that game more than this one for a variety of reasons and I do love 1 as well. I just prefer the approach 2 takes to the world a lot more in just about every way. It feels like a genuine attempt to develop the concepts of Dark Souls into a serious and compelling narrative that DS1 only vaguely approached. It's when people say they prefer Dark Souls 3 to this one that I really start to question my sanity. I struggle to think of a reason why anyone could play both games and come away genuinely preferring Dark Souls 3, a blatant nostalgia-baiting cashgrab of Souls imagery lazily tacked onto the framework of Bloodborne, but to each their own, I suppose. I think the way that game kind of ruins everything this game attempts to do with the ideas of hollowing and the eternal recurrence of lighting the fire/the effect that has on history (I never see anyone talking about it but the Ancient Dragon Memory in this is seriously one of the coolest moments in the entire series mostly because the game hasn't spent half it's runtime on dumb callbacks and recreated areas up to that point. Nothing in 3 even comes close.) is reason enough to hate it but it also just sucks on its own and is probably the best indictment of Fromsoft's general downward trajectory in recent years. Admittedly I did really like Elden Ring when it came out but I've gotta go back to that one and see if it was just the hype of playing it alongside everyone else in the first month or so or if it was really that good.

One of my only real complaints with 2 is that there is a bit of an overreliance on underground areas, but it's more than made up for since so much of this game looks amazing. Ds1 has like two good-looking areas across its entire duration (Darkroot Garden and Anor Londo) and 2 surpasses that within the first few hours with Majula, Heide's Tower, and the Lost Bastille alone. The caves and tombs can be a bit of a slog but push through it and you get even more gorgeous areas at the end like the Dragon Aerie, Shrine of Amana, basically every location in the DLC, etc. This is pretty much the pinnacle of From's visual design in my mind, outside of some of the awesome pulp sci-fi/horror inspired stuff in Elden Ring (and to be fair to Ds2, a good chunk of that is stuff they were already doing here... the underground cities feel very reminiscent of Heide's Tower and the Old Chaos.) I mentioned the recent decline in the quality of Fromsoft games earlier so I think I have to address the music, probably the most obvious way their games have gradually gotten worse and worse. Even in Dark Souls 1 the score was already a lot worse than in Demon's Souls and by the time you get to Elden Ring there's only one or two even remotely memorable tracks in the entire game.

However, here in Ds2 I think the music might actually be better than the first game, although you can still see the gradual homogenization of the music into generic "cinematic" orchestral slop, and a lot of it feels weirdly misplaced. Like Old Dragonslayer rocks and I love how Skeleton Lord evokes the harsher brass and strings of the Demon's Souls score... but what did those two completely unremarkable fights do to warrant some of the best tracks on the score when far more important bosses get far more generic music? And there's no excuse for some of the best songs on the soundtrack, Queen of Drangleic and Sin and Crowns, not even appearing in the game. Still, it's mostly pretty good. I'm definitely not a huge fan of the Ds3 soundtrack, but Yuka Kitamura who composed most of that soundtrack does some of the best tracks in Ds2, like Sir Alonne, Worshipers of the Dead, the aforementioned Old Dragonslayer, and so on. She uses a lot of the same elements here that you can find all over Ds3 so I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with her compositions, and If anything I like her work in this game a bit better than Motoi Sakuraba's. it's more likely that From or Bandai Namco gradually pushed for a more generic orchestral sound that would be immediately recognizable as "dark souls music" without ever taking the risk of trying anything new or actually memorable.

I've probably been talking about the soundtrack for too long. What I'm getting at here is that this game is really good. I think it's probably the best in the series, and I don't think I'll ever really understand why more people don't agree with me. Play it if you haven't, play it again if you have. Go in with an open mind and you might just find you like it a lot more than people online made you think you would!